environmental aesthetics || living in glass houses: domesticity, interior decoration, and...

Living in Glass Houses: Domesticity, Interior Decoration, and Environmental AestheticsAuthor(s): Kevin MelchionneSource: The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 56, No. 2, Environmental Aesthetics(Spring, 1998), pp. 191-200Published by: Wiley on behalf of The American Society for AestheticsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/432257 .

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KEVIN MELCHIONNE

Living in Glass Houses: Domesticity, Interior Decoration, and Environmental Aesthetics

I. LIVING IN ART

In his Philosophy of Interior Design, Stanley Abercrombie writes that "we can live happily with art-some cannot live happily without it- but we cannot live in art or even in a 'white cube."'" This is a strange assertion by someone writing a book on interior design theory. Interior design is presumably an art and since we live in interiors, we must also live in art. Of course, what Abercrombie means is that we cannot live in interiors entirely given over to an aesthetic vision and, consequently, divorced from all consideration of what it might really mean to inhabit them. Abercrombie's examples include Piet Mondrian's Salon de Madame B. and Kurt Schwitter's Merzbau. I think we could add, by implication, a number of what are typically thought of as extreme examples of modern architecture, notably Philip Johnson's notorious Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut.2 The Glass House is a canonical example of high modernist architecture and interior design. The walls are made of plate glass, enclosing the structure while retaining a complete 360-degree view of the property outside. From the outside, one gets a free view into the interior as well. The interior itself is sparsely but carefully furnished in the characteristic high modernist mode.

Johnson's Glass House captured a great deal of attention when first built. It is still widely hailed as a high modernist masterpiece and is regularly included in surveys of modern architecture. At the same time that Johnson's house is celebrated as great architecture, it is sneered at for being unlivable. Despite its art-historical sig- nificance, the Glass House is thought by most to be unlivable not necessarily because it is aesthetically displeasing, but because it subordi- nates all other goals to this aesthetic pleasure. If the interior of the Glass House is thought of as

ugly by many, it is perhaps because the attrac- tiveness of an interior depends not just on visual spectacle but also perceived livability. The Glass House lacks what we judge today as livability: comfort, casualness, and a certain degree of dowdy familiarity. The building serves more to make an aesthetic point or an art-historical splash, and these motivations turn out here to be separate from the more mundane pleasures of domestic life.

At first glance, the Glass House seems to be very much a work of environmental art. Sur- rounded by glass walls, the occupant is im- mersed in, though not physically subject to, the shifting atmospheric conditions of the outdoors. Perhaps no other house allows the occupant a more intimate sense of its natural surroundings. But is this what is meant by an environmental aesthetic of domestic space? A basic precept of any introductory interior design course is that the role of interior design is to provide artistically satisfying and practically effective solu- tions to the organization of the environments in which we must do particular things, like cooking, entertaining, sleeping, bathing, and loung- ing. The art of domestic interior design would be to create an environment that facilitates domestic practice while at the same time making the environment worthy of aesthetic attention and admiration. On this view, the Glass House fails as full-fledged interior design (that is, as environmental art) because it never recedes into the background, never becomes an environment for the practices of everyday life.3 The glass walls render the occupant perpetually self-con- scious of being watched; the sparseness of the furnishings and the extreme orderliness of the house, where even table-top bric-a-brac are dis- creetly marked with indications of their correct

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 56:2 Spring 1998



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location,4 mean that one can never feel truly at home. The Glass House contradicts the long- standing Western association of dwelling with enclosure, privacy, and relaxation. As these ten- dencies are deeply entrenched, one can never get used to the Glass House and so can never truly inhabit it. But what a revealing failure it is! It is my contention that to genuinely understand what it takes to live in the Glass House will bring us a long way in understanding how it is that the ordinary process of inhabiting our homes is an artistic practice, a kind of environmental art.

On the conventional view of interior design sketched above, to truly inhabit the Glass House would require that one "fix" it by adding some rooms off the back, walling in some of the plate glass, and introducing more furniture and clutter. But then, the building would no longer be the Glass House, the work of art designed by Philip Johnson. In order to live in a work of art, one must respect it as a designed product, that is, one must live according to its rules. This means not moving the furniture or adding objects, lest the composition be destroyed. It also means making sure that mess and clutter do not take over such that we can no longer see the original artistic creation. The respectful occupant must be a curator of sorts, preserving the house while living in it. This is clearly a difficult way to live! Nonetheless, it is possible to inhabit the Glass House, but obviously one must be a special sort of person whom I shall term a "radical aesthete."

It is revealing that Johnson did not propose the house as a universal model of "true living." As he famously retorted to one visitor who ex- pressed her aversion to living in it, Johnson did not design the house for anyone but himself. Johnson seems to embody this radical aestheticism; he gives to the search for aesthetic pleasure more importance than most people and is perfectly satisfied to live in ways that others perceive as dreadfully uncomfortable, even inhuman. In another of his famous quips, Johnson says that "comfort is a function of whether you think a chair is good-looking or not."5 Thus, we can assume that Johnson does not experience the Glass House as uncomfortable. Rather, we should believe that Johnson inhabits the house in perfect harmony with its severe rules, which, after all, are presumably his own. Johnson never feels compelled to drag in a book case or a dumpy chair found at a tag sale, leave his clothes

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

on the floor or let dishes pile up in the kitchen sink for days.

II. THE INHABITANT AS CURATOR

But perhaps Johnson does not really live in the Glass House as most people live in their houses. After all, the Glass House is not his primary res- idence. It has always been more of a weekend retreat from New York. There are numerous out- buildings on the property, probably serving to capture the predictable overflow of "stuff" from the architectural masterpiece. Perhaps Johnson only pretended to live in the Glass House in order to make an aesthetic point or to promote himself as an architect. On this view, the Glass House remains half stage set, half hotel room. Were this an accurate representation of his in- tentions, Johnson's aestheticism would be pos- turing. For my purposes, it scarcely matters whether Johnson is really the radical aesthete that he makes himself out to be. It is possible to imagine how he would have to live were he to live in the house as it was supposed to be lived in, that is, to live in it in a way that respects it as art. We can still sketch out the domestic practice of this special person-a limit case of sorts-to help explain how living in a house on a daily basis can be seen as an environmental art.

Perhaps the Glass House is unlivable as a domestic space; but as a work of fine art, the Glass House does exactly what it is supposed to do, namely, to refine and intensify experiences already available to us in everyday life. Though the severity of the Glass House will strike many as perverse, I will argue that it is only an extremely refined version of what any sensitive homemaker creates. The Glass House helps us to see what I term the art of domesticity. The art of domesticity means not just that the house is art, but that the very way of living in it is also an art, made and remade on a daily basis. As we shall see, these two arts, making and living, are connected. Along with the important care-work that often characterizes domestic responsibili- ties, this is what I take to be the genuine meaning of the term homemaking.

The successful occupant of the Glass House or any other pristine, severe, and hyperorganized environment lives in the house in perfect harmony with its formal configuration and artistic meaning. On a daily basis, one achieves



Melchionne Living in Glass Houses

this harmony by developing a repertoire of habits that simultaneously achieves two things: first, it allows one to do everything one normally does in a home; second, our habits ensure that we always do these things in a way that respects and reflects the artistic integrity of the space.

In a hyperorganized environment, design leads and habit follows. The house is a spectacle to which the inhabitant must adjust. The practice of dwelling must respond to the conception of order embodied in the arrangement of objects. Johnson has created an ideal space, character- ized by a clear exposition of formal principles like symmetry, unity, and harmony, in relative abstraction from conventional lifestyle patterns marked by privacy, informality, and comfort. As we have already noted, everything in the Glass House has a place. The space is a composition. To move (at least on a permanent basis) a piece of the composition is to destroy the work of art. Thus, the correct manner of inhabiting the Glass House must also be a form of protection of the original composition. To maintain the composition, the true occupant would have to return everything to its spot. Insofar as sustained domestic practice requires that household objects are used as a matter of unconscious habit, to cor- rectly use them and return them would mean that one's habits are perfectly adjusted to the composition. Someone who habitually puts things back in their places has a habit-repertoire that is fully responsive to the organizational and aesthetic terms of inhabited space. Consequently, in order to successfully inhabit the Glass House, one would have to be extremely, perhaps perfectly neat and organized; neatness and organization would have to be perfectly habituated.

Rather than organizing the space around pre- existing habits, the body is implicated in the idealized order of the Glass House. Domestic practice becomes the art of maintaining the discipline of implication in the order, of more or less forcing habit to follow aesthetic conception. This explains why formal and hyperorganized spaces are felt to be "uncomfortable" and their radical aestheticist occupants subject to the pop-Freudian epithet anal. The spaces demand too much. But the radical aesthete is less both- ered than others by this imposition. The embodied experience-one might say, "synaesthetic"- of being inside, indeed, part of the composition induces in the radical aesthete the greatest of

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pleasures. Pleasure resides in the implication of the body in an aesthetically pleasing scheme, not just experience of space as an aesthetically pleasing visualfield.

This is admittedly an obscure kind of aesthetic experience. But I believe that it is very common. The fact that even nonradicals (who might still be aesthetes in some less extreme sense) are aware of the way spaces make aesthetic demands on the body can be seen in the discomfort felt by the nonradical in the formal environment. The sense that one cannot relax or slouch in a hyperorganized environment, that one must sit up straight, reveals that even the nonradical is aware of the way some spaces seem to require our bodies to aesthetically con- form. Unlike the radical aesthete, the nonradical perceives the space as a nest of prohibitions. For the same reason, the fastidious feel uncomfortable in a dumpy room, where the dusty couch invites slouching and where "good manners" come off as arrogance.

Unlike the radical aesthete, most people today tend to resent immensely the demands of formal rooms. While many are impressed by the strictly designed spaces of which Johnson's Glass House is the extreme example, few wish to live in them. Most of us lack the proper repertoire of habits. Even if we wanted to cultivate such a repertoire, our lives are simply too con- fusing and overloaded to do so. Not surprisingly, this radical aestheticism is usually practiced by single people living tranquil lives of autocratic self-indulgence or very wealthy families who can pay to have someone else maintain, that is, clean up, the rarefied design.

For these reasons, the norm of perfect harmony of domestic habit and domestic space is perceived as elitist. For instance, Witold Ry- bczynski looks askance at Johnson's aestheticism (and all high modernism) for precisely the kind of discipline of the body that I have described here.6 According to Rybczynski, such spaces lack comfort. This lack of comfort is a deep-seated mistake of modern architecture and design. Fueled by aesthetic ideology, modernism, on Rybczynski's view, misses the profound long-term trajectory of interior design toward increased comfort and intimacy. Rybczynski argues that modernism is consumed with style at the expense of comfort; style takes over design, obscuring mundane but ultimately more impor-



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tant domestic values. We can account for this mistake by looking at the modernist theory of design through which stylistic proclivities of the high modernist era take on an essentialist status as the inherently correct form for objects, whence the famous tropes, "machine for living" and "form follows function."7 However, in the home, form and function rarely have this con- nection. Airplanes must be streamlined, but not lamps or ashtrays. Bauhaus functionalism and American streamlining were more formal play and metaphorical expression than pure "design engineering." In the world of home furnishings, modern design is not so much progress as it is a fashion. When we perceive the modernist interior as unlivable, perhaps we are not so much making a judgment about the failure of the modernist designer to use "common sense" about the priority of comfort over fashion as we are simply reflecting a change of fashion, on which we graft a radical critique of modern design method. Why do we assume that it is due to the failing of high modernist design that we, post- moderns, do not feel comfortable in those interiors? It is better to say that it is we who have lost the capacity to be enchanted by these sleek coffee tables and geometrically patterned textiles. We are no longer able to let these fashions rule our lives, blind, of course, to the rule of others, like the Victorian coziness that seems to guide Rybczynski. Just forty years ago, it was deemed as "unlivable" as high modernism is today.

The Glass House may very well be unlivable, but it is only an extreme version of what the ordinary homemaker does, and is valuable for revealing that to us. All houses and all interior decoration of houses imply repertoires of habit insofar as, by their very architectural structure and decorative organization, they oblige us to live in one way and not another. An interior is a composition and so, like the Glass House, requires us to maintain it, that is, to act in ways that respect what has been created. Most com- positions are not so severe as that of the Glass House and so practice is likewise less forbidding.

III. INTERIOR DECORATION AND CLEANING

The capacity to engage any space habitually is dependent upon the wisdom of the spatial arrangement. If a system of organization requires effort to remember or maintain, then it is


less likely that the system will be genuinely used. Disorder will ensue more quickly and tidying up will require more energy. Since it requires more energy, tidying will be done less frequently, and so the aesthetic qualities of the design will end up obscured by the inability to maintain the scheme. In properly organizing, say, a kitchen, the role of habit figures promi- nently: finding the right places for things means gauging the optimal relation between space and self. It means anticipating how habits will medi- ate this relation. Planning, however, can never fully anticipate how we will habitually relate to a space. Any design will end up subject to subtle shifts in where we place things until habit and spatial organization are calibrated to meet each other. The success of the process of calibration requires that, in contrast to Johnson's Glass House, the homemaker avoid imposing a pre- conceived plan of organization upon already existing habits. Instead, calibration involves judging whether existing habits will be responsive to possible ordering schemes.8 Such calibration of design and habit is essential to the art of domesticity.

Everyday domestic practice can be inter- preted as a response to the status of ordinary domestic space as a work of art. In this way, interior decoration does not float above daily life as a pure visual spectacle but is linked to labor and habit through the mundane chore of tidying up. Tidying bridges the gap between use and design. It is that which allows the art of decoration to live on after the original decorating is finished. Rather than rendering the space hygienic, tidying means arranging and ordering, that is, put- ting things back in their places or establishing places for things. As Thomas Leddy observes, "cleaning up" the lines of a painting usually means clarifying the composition by sharpen- ing the edges of the forms.9 Similarly, in domestic space, we may say that cleaning up clar- ifies the sense of order in a room. Tidying may be no more than straightening piles of books on a table, removing a tea cup, filing papers, or dust- ing. But, it may also be returning each object to its unique and preordained spot, as in Johnson's Glass House. No matter how elaborate, tidying bears a direct relation to design. Indeed, design is a necessary condition for tidying. To put things back in their places means that, at an ear- lier moment, interior space had to be ordered in




its parts. As Leddy puts it, "to say that something can be neatened or cleaned implies that there is something underlying that is worthy of neatening/cleaning."'0 By resetting the composition as it was originally conceived, we reacti- vate the original decorative intention and heighten the aesthetic quality of the home. The tidy home invites visitors and occupants alike to view it as a work of art.

Tidying can also lead to a variation on the original scheme by moving furniture or rear- ranging objects on a shelf. Here, tidying is the adjustment or elaboration of some original creative act. In such cases, tidying involves further creative decisions rather than just curatorial maintenance. The importance of the creative side of tidying is easily underestimated. For reasons of both expense and convention, most people never decorate their homes-or even a single room-in one fell swoop. Rather, over time, the scheme of a room is adumbrated in fits and starts, until it arrives at a state of completion. Even then, rooms often return to the status of "work-in-progress." As a room's aesthetic punch begins to fade with familiarity, the homemaker has the option of sprucing up the room by re- painting, changing window or furniture textiles, or by dragging home some new bric-a-brac. Fur- thermore, the practice of living on a day-to-day basis in a space, of habituating oneself to that space is marked by the honing of aesthetic perception, and a more precise sense of what one's practical needs are. The "go-slow" approach allows one to sharpen aesthetic vision and define practical needs over time. One is unlikely to create something dramatic working this way, but one lowers the risk of total failure as well. In any case, it is impossible to tidy without decorating or having already decorated. That a house has a cluttered or sparse look does not alter this relation between tidying and decorating. Casual or formal, cozy or austere, tidying is in both cases a process of restoration, adjustment, or creation of a composition.

That a house is cluttered does not mean that it is undecorated or even that it need not be maintained in its cluttered appearance. As Peter Thornton shows in his magisterial study of the history of interior decorating, Authentic Decor, the aesthetics of clutter-or what he terms "density"-are rather complex.' 1 Density refers to the number of objects and the complexity of tex-

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tile pattern that can be tolerated in any given era. For example, the high Victorian era is marked by an extraordinary degree of density, whereas, in reaction, the modernist era favored a low density, against which fashion has recently turned once again. Thus, the perception of a room being "over-cluttered" is historically relative. Even the lightest room of the 1 880s is likely to strike a Philip Johnson of the 1950s as insufferable.

Since there can be too much or too little clutter, clutter must be designed and maintained. There is taste for clutter, as Leddy observes. Some people prefer clutter, judging it to be aesthetically superior to neatness, especially when the latter is taken to the extreme. In fact, we can identify a design strategy in clutter: decoration through collection. With discriminating care, the homemaker adds more and more objects to a space until the effect of the room is an overall pattern, often charged with autobiographical resonance. A young homemaker motivated by the aesthetics of clutter must work hard and fast to accumulate enough stuff of the right quality in order to pull off the cluttered look. For the young homemaker, it is easier to be a minimal- ist. An older homemaker must, however, take care to edit clutter in order to keep it at the ap- propriate level. Minimalism, then, becomes something of a feat.

Leddy observes that there is a uniquely feminist attitude to clutter and mess. Women who have been trained to clean up after others and to take responsibility for the neatness of a home particularly relish clutter, presumably because it is the sign of liberation. This is to be distin- guished from merely tolerating clutter as the cost of engaging one's time in both a career and an independent social life. I think it would be useful here to distinguish clutter, which retains some decorative intention, from mess; for the pure slob, there is no tidying because there is no underlying design which might orient it. 12 Most vindications of outright messiness are decidedly masculinist in tenor. For messy men, messiness is often described as freedom from women, especially mothers, and social convention in general. There is a misogynist association of neatness with feminine primness and motherly nagging.'3 The male slob tends to defend his mess as a sign of independence, attacking those who are committed to maintaining a composed home as neurotic neatniks or dull conformists.14



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The neatnik is a puritan, and the slob is a hedo- nist, throwing off the yoke of tidiness and its endless chores. Yet the fact that slobs often defend themselves by the dubious assurance that their space is "messy" but not "dirty" (as if one could actually "clean" without removing the strata of books and clothes) reflects the fact that mainstream housekeeping values are couched in terms of hygienicism rather than aestheticism. The slob argues that his mess has not given way to inhuman conditions. Appearances aside, his space, he claims, is no different than that of his grandmother. If the mess-as-freedom argument is hedonism, then the clean-but-not-neat argument is puritanism. Now in his puritanical mode, the slob dismisses interior decoration, and the related practice of tidying as a silly, feminine indulgence for which he has no time.

IV. FEMINISM AND THE ART OF DOMESTICITY

As the analysis of tidying shows us, labor figures centrally in the art of domesticity. The dou- ble status of domesticity as art and labor (along with the moral value of the related care-work that takes place in the home) explains the am- bivalence within feminism toward domesticity. On the one hand, feminists recognize the importance of entering public life for the emancipa- tion of women, and the role of inordinate domestic responsibility in sabotaging women's efforts to do so. 15 Feminists are, therefore, sus- picious of any attempt to idealize the home. On the other hand, many feminists are committed to recognizing the importance of what women traditionally contribute, and, thus, seek to high- light the value of domestic labor, especially care-work. Unfortunately, the antifeminist positions of leading nineteenth-century domestic theorists like Catharine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe make it difficult to speak of homemaking as an art without coming under suspicion for vindicating what now goes by the catch phrase "traditional family values." On the standard feminist view, the science of home economics, from its inception, has been a patri- archal concession to incipient demands for women's equality. While opposing women's suf- frage, and accepting the restriction to the domestic sphere, Catharine Beecher nonetheless argues for a symmetry between the domestic and public spheres. The intellectual demands of


domestic management are, she argues, as great as those of the business world. Homemaking requires complex rational operations worthy of advanced study as "home economics." Hence, women are in need of an education to prepare them for their roles as wives and mothers. Such was Beecher's argument for the founding of women's colleges.'6 From the mid-nineteenth century to the second wave of the women's movement in the 1960s, the ploy of raising domestic work to an art or science while at the same time enforcing women's restriction to this zone has been central to the reconciliation of modernization and patriarchy. On this view, at the very moment when the local economy gives way to the industrial-consumer economy, erod- ing traditional gender roles and fueling women's political demands, bourgeois sex-segregation is updated through the "women's science." Thus, patriarchy conspires with modernization to re- found itself, conceding new notions of women's rationality and agency without permitting women new freedoms. This standard critique of home economics does not tell the whole story. Women did not just enter home economics departments in search of a scientistic finishing school; they also enrolled because it was a promising route to jobs as buyers for growing department stores, food chemists for processed food manufactur- ers, and assistants to designers and architects seeking the "feminine point of view." Far from being seen as second-rate apologists for patriarchy, their teachers were perceived as models of the "liberated woman."'17

Attempts to articulate an art of domesticity stand in a understandable shadow of suspicion: the project risks being no more than an aestheti- cized whitewashing of the subordination of women. On the other hand, so long as the home remains the site of so much daily practice, the question of the quality and rewards of domestic practice needs to be posed. Feminist or not, we all come home to cooking, cleaning, and, by implication, decorating chores that we do with more or less aesthetic sensitivity. In the gender- just home, the art of domesticity still needs to be articulated. Feminism requires that we reformu- late the art of domesticity in gender-neutral terms. Thus, the challenge to this project is to distinguish homemaking as cultivation from homemaking as servitude. We can do this not by pretending that the work does not exist, but in-




stead by returning to long-neglected questions of nonalienated labor. Indeed, homemaking may even offer a model for a theory of nonalienated labor. Rather than interpose a radical break between idle pleasures and arduous ne- cessities, I want to suggest that homemaking, when it is not simply servitude, is a matter of in- tegrating pleasure and labor, of extending the reach of pleasure while forcing the retreat of ar- duousness. Habit, as I have construed it here, is essential to this process. On my view, homemaking is the orchestration of patterns of habit. Through habituation, labor and pleasure can be integrated. The art of domesticity locates where pleasure surges out of labor in a beautiful room, a savory meal, a pleasant moment alone, with family, or with guests.

V. GRACE

Thus far, we have only examined the art of domesticity as the relation between the making, honing, and maintaining of interior designs. More generally, the art of domesticity involves the aesthetic enrichment of domestic process (i.e., labor itself) and domestic products (rooms, meals, and moments). We not only live in art, but we live as art when the process of domestic life possesses what I call "grace." The possibility of grace in domesticity resides, in part, upon the cultivation of habit that we have already discussed. As we saw in the analysis of tidying, the practice of homemaking lies in the negotiation of the tension between habit and spectacle. Grace enters into domestic practice when the homemaker seeks to accentuate or, at least, retain the spectacular dimension of a space without destroying the equilibrium of labor and pleasure rooted in habit. In short, the homemaker seeks to inhabit a beautiful space without becoming a slave to it.

In the decorating magazines, this tension between spectacle and habit is reflected in the opened book on the coffee table, the pillows tossed on the divan, the flowers on the table, the tea service set out on the side table as if the occupants had stepped out of the frame of the picture and their everyday lives just long enough for the picture to be taken. The decorating magazines (or, as they are known in the trade, shelter magazines) seek to express a "perfect carelessness," a feigned indifference to the sump-

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tuous environments, as if to emphasize to the gawkers that this prestigious photo spread really is not that important. It is as if the inhabitants were saying, "Who? Us? You want to take a picture of our little abode? Why, we live like this everyday. Utter taste and impeccable housekeeping are just more nasty habits we've inher- ited along with our money." True aestheticism, as opposed to conspicuous consumption, is sup- posedly a private self-indulgence enjoyed for its own sake in perfect modesty. As Mario Praz puts it:

The true lover of furnishings does not maintain his home for the comfort of his friends, nor even for their amazement. It is only reluctantly and with some annoyance that he agrees to make a tour de proprietaire for his visitors. It is erroneous to believe he lives only for this.18

This statement must be taken as a pose. Other- wise, it would difficult to imagine how Praz put up with the "annoyance" necessary to write his own autobiography, which unfolds into the ulti- mate case study in "house-pride": it is written through the objects that he has collected over the years and displays in his house! He describes them as he moves ever so slowly from room to room of his apartment in the palace of a venera- ble patrician family on via Giulia in Rome.'9 Poses, however, are signs of ideals that we do not believe to be genuinely embodied (in Praz's case, the false modesty of a private aestheticism). Poses reflect values and ambitions, and with them, practical and aesthetic problems; they can only be successfully struck when spec- tators are unwilling to risk ruining their own voyeuristic enchantment.

The problem betrayed by Praz's false modesty is the relation between a domestic spectacle requiring the fresh eyes of the visitor and the embodied pleasures of habit accessible only to the occupant. It is here that I would like to locate the faculty of grace, and the suggestive but, for many, repellent term, gracious living. It is difficult to employ these terms without appearing to veer off into an offensive celebration of the leisure class. What is repugnant about the notion of gracious living is the strong whiff of a leisurely lifestyle purchased out of the labor of others: "gracious living" seems to be no more than snobbism. No doubt, such an attitude de-



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serves much of its ill repute, but still some of this criticism is unfortunate-and vaguely puritanical in its political rigor-for it devalues attempts to articulate substantive visions of the good life at the level of the home by leaving the false impression that such visions are the exclu- sive purview of the aristocrat.20 The Oxford English Dictionary records the first use of the term "gracious living" in only 1932. And then, much of its use seems to be ironic and pejora- tive, denoting a neo-aristocratic preciousness. Since the art of domesticity involves the lifting of domestic chores out of pure drudgery and into style, the closely related yet distinct senses of grace, graciousness, and gracefulness are il- luminating for the aesthetics of the domestic environment and ought to be reclaimed.

Of the two senses of grace, the first, graciousness, is theological and, derivatively, monarchi- cal in origin. It means a favorable regard, concession, or gift from an absolute power, often, but not necessarily, resulting in some virtue or excellence, such as saintliness. Graciousness is unconditional generosity, clearly a quality of the good host. The second sense, gracefulness, is primarily aesthetic, denoting qualities of ele- gance, ease, or refinement; it is often, but not necessarily, associated with bodily movement. The theological and aesthetic senses are related in that there is something ineffable about grace. What makes one dancer more graceful than another of equal skill is often mysterious, and so it is not surprising that we characterize such talent as a gift. However, it would be misleading to blur the relation between the two senses of the term: to receive grace from the gracious does not mean that what one receives is necessarily gracefulness. By the grace of the king, I might receive something as graceless as a concession to sell potatoes at market, or a military commis- sion at a dusty imperial outpost.

Grace suggests endeavor yet effortlessness, which is why prodigious talent is often said to possess this endowment. In a world without ser- vants, grace in the art of domesticity means that the homemaker must not just keep a beautiful house or cook a delicious meal but do so with an economy of effort. Drudgery in the production of ephemeral domestic pleasures diminishes the pleasure and creates bad memories of past efforts. When the kitchen is behind closed doors in a restaurant, that a meal is made gracefully is


largely irrelevant to our enjoying it. We may hope that the crew enjoys the pleasures of grace in preparing the meal (though, from experience, I suggest that we would be naive to expect it), but we enjoy the taste of our meal in ignorance of the conditions of its genesis. However, when entertaining at home, the timing of the courses, the orchestration of various dishes, the prepara- tion and cleaning up must all transpire in front of the guests. Kitchen work is no longer just the personal calibration of habit to space, but is tied as well to the very pleasure of eating and entertaining: if we have worked too hard and have made too much of a mess, we will be too ex- hausted to enjoy our meal and our company. Moreover, our fuss will be experienced as a guilt-inducing burden by the guests. Too aware of the labor that went into it, they will be inca- pable of fully enjoying the meal. In contrast, the graceful host recognizes that the pleasure of the guests does not increase at the same rate as the effort of the host. More importantly, by temper- ing exertion, the pleasure of company is freely enjoyed even as the meal is being prepared. Since the guests enjoy the company of the host, they assume that the work is light (which, in re- ality, it should be for the most part), and they are not burdened by the generosity of the host.

The aestheticization of domestic process likens it to a performance. The refinement of in- teraction (what we normally term "efficiency") is marked by both the achievement of a goal and the enhancing of pleasure in daily chores. Process, then, becomes more than a means; it becomes a source of inherent gratification. In this way, efficiency in work escapes the oppres- sive constriction of Taylorism and is recast in nonalienated terms. Thus, domestic grace is not just the appearance of one's lodging, but also the faculty of living well in them. Domestic grace is taste at the level of how life is lived; it is style raised exponentially from formal delight to the rhythms of daily life. Grace is the art of drawing labor and pleasure together, reducing drudgery through the choreography of ordinary domestic processes so as to leave the impression-half ar- tifice, half truth-that a great meal was not slaved over and that the house is always as together as it is this evening.




IV. CONCLUSION

It is often observed that homemaking is a kind of art. This "art of inhabiting" or "art of the home" is a complex of skills and sensibilities ranging from interior planning and decoration to cleaning, cooking, and entertaining. No doubt, the neglect of the art of the home is ac- counted for by the same reasons as the neglect of so many other arts traditionally practiced by women.

The difficulties posed by deep-seated sexism are compounded by the fact that the aesthetic virtues of the home are usually background qualities that affect our experience of the space without calling attention to themselves. If it is true that, as Abercrombie observes, the power of interior space in general is that it surrounds us when we enter so that we are no longer just an observer but also its content, then the aesthetic of the interior lies not merely in the visual appearance of rooms and their contents, but in how we experience being the content of rooms or, in other words, how we experience interior space as environment.2' This experience is de- termined less by our attention to objects that we might encounter in the room than our unfocused sense of the room as an unacknowledged background or setting for the occasion that brings us into the room. It is sometimes impossible to distinguish the thrill of entering a space from the thrill of the objects or persons we encounter there, a fact that has been thoroughly exploited by retailers. As Francis Sparshott argues in his now classic essay on the subject, environmental features function as texture, adornment, or mod- ification of a setting rather than as an "icon" as- serting itself upon us: 'A feature, however conspicuous, contributes to an environment when it serves as accent or foil. Its aesthetic value ceases to be environmental only in so far as it functions as an autonomous object out to monopolize attention."22 Perhaps this environmental view of interior design helps to explain why it is ignored as an art. Part of the success of any interior design is that, unlike that of the Glass House, our attention to it never overrides our purposes for being there. A well-designed interior is like art- fully applied makeup: unnoticed but captivating.

Another difficulty in appreciating homemaking as an art results from the fact that homemaking is marked by a thorough integration of

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artistic practice and labor. Unlike paradigmatic art forms like painting or poetry, interiors do not just sit around after their completion unal- tered for the centuries. They are lived in, worked in, and worked on and so they are also trans- formed, if only by being worn upon daily. The result is that it is difficult to identify the art in the typical flurry of domestic activity. By char- acterizing the art of domesticity as an environmental art, that is, an art of the surroundings rather than of object-fashioning, we take a step toward understanding in what respect domestic practice is aesthetically and artistically signifi- cant. The notion of domesticity as an environmental art links two distinct, though usually in- separable, practices: first, the design of space (as in what the interior designer typically does), and, second, the actual process of inhabiting and maintaining of space (which is not usually considered "artistic" in any meaningful way). Though neglected by aestheticians, they are by no means exotic. Indeed, it is in just these ways that we all live in glass houses.

KEVIN MELCHIONNE

National Museum of American Art Smithsonian Institution Washington, DC 20560

INTERNET: [email protected]

1. Stanley Abercrombie, A Philosophy of Interior Design (New York: Harper and Row, 1990), p. 135.

2. Philip Johnson, The Glass House, eds. David Whitney and Jeffrey Kipnis (New York: Pantheon Books, 1993).

3. With this definition of environmental aesthetics, I am relying upon Sparshott's now classic article on environmental aesthetics: F. E. Sparshott, "Figuring the Ground: Notes on Some Theoretical Problems of the Aesthetic Environ- ment," The Journal of Aesthetic Education 6, no. 1 (1972): 11-23.

4. As remarked by the designer, Ward Bennet, in Julie Tovine, "Is There an Art to a Well-Placed Chair?" The Newt York Times Magazine, March 12, 1995, p. 72.

5. Philip Johnson, Writings (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 138. Cited by Witold Rybczynski, Home: A Short History of an Idea (New York; Viking, 1986), p. 211.

6. Witold Rybczynski, Home: A Short History of an Idea. 7. For a critique of modernist design theory, see David

Pye, The Nature and Aesthetics of Design (London: Barrie and Jenkins Ltd., 1978).

8. The notion of the calibration of habit to space as the key of design, of course, is familiar to students of industrial design, but it has been central to "domestic engineering" as



200 The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

well. See Rybczynski, "Efficiency," in Home: A Short His- tory of an Idea, pp. 135-157.

9. Thomas Leddy, "Everyday Surface Qualities: 'Neat,' 'Messy,' 'Clean,' 'Dirty,"' The Journal ofAesthetics and Art Criticism 53 (1995): 259-268.

10. Ibid., p. 260. 11. Peter Thornton, Authentic Decor: The Domestic In-

terior 1620-1920 (New York: Random House, 1984), pp. 8-9.

12. This is not to say aesthetic pleasure in mess is not possible. But it is not an aesthetic pleasure in a work of art; it is more like pleasure in a natural rock or cloud formation. The terror and awe that often seize the visitor to the home of an extreme slob suggest that such messes might qualify as a kind of domestic sublime.

13. Aside from simply being unused to cleaning because men have picked up the idea that it is not their job, male messiness is, then, a symptom of the rejection of the mother as the domestic sergeant-at-arms described in feminist psy- choanalytic writings. Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering: Psycho-Analysis and the Sociology of Gender (University of California Press, 1978).

14. There is a long-standing critique of fastidiousness in our culture, going back at least to the domestic theory of Stowe. The preference of a certain dowdy atmosphere in the home over an expensive and, here again, unlivable spectacle is part of Stowe's effort to reconcile the aesthetics of the home with its moral and economic health. Harriet Beecher Stowe, "Household Papers and Stories," in vol. 8 of The Writ- ings of Harriet Beecher Stowe (1864; reprint, New York: AMS Press, 1967).

15. For an account of the role of domestic labor in the oppression of women, see Christine Delphy, Close to Home: A Materialist Analysis of Women's Oppression (University of Massachusetts Press, 1984). Interestingly, according to one

study, the correlation between the amount of domestic work men claim to do and the amount of work women perceive them doing is closest in the countries where men admit to doing the least work. For example, in Italy, only 15% of men said that they "often" helped their wives in the house and 13% of women said their husbands often helped. However, in the United Kingdom, where the highest number (48%) of men claimed to help out often, only 32% of women claimed their husbands often helped out. See The Economic Role of Women in the ECE Region: Developments 1975/85 (New York: United Nations, 1985), p. 24.

16. Catharine Beecher, Educational Reminiscences (New York: J. B. Ford and Co., 1874).

17. I am indebted to Anna Ruth Ediger Baehr for her rec- ollections of studying home economics in the late 1930s.

18. Mario Praz, An Illustrated History of Furnishings, from the Renaissance to the 20th Century (New York: Braziller, 1964), p. 30.

19. Mario Praz, The House of Life (1958), trans. Angus Davidson (New York: Methuen, 1964).

20. The distinction between luxury and grace is even wielded by patrician aesthetes like Edith Wharton and Ogdan Codman Jr. as a means of distinguishing the wealthy, yet sensitive, aesthete from the crass social climber. See their discussion of bric-a-brac in The Decoration of Houses (New York: Scribner's, 1907), pp. 184-195. Yet the distinction is also employed by middle-class moralists like Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose "Household Papers and Stories" is foremost an attempt to show that not only is beauty possible without much money, but that the beauty of economy is morally and aesthetically superior to that procured by facile and debt-creating purchases.

21. Abercrombie, A Philosophy of Interior Design, p. 3. 22. Sparshott, "Figuring the Ground," p. 22.



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