In the Preface to American Artifacts: Essays in Material Culture, Paul Mellon Professor Emeritus, Jules David Prown, states that even through ‘every work of art is [perceived to be] an artifact… all artifacts are not necessarily art.’ (2000) After a careful dissection of the collection’s essays on various objects and their relationship to American culture (with a capital ‘C’), I couldn’t agree more. What Professor Prown and a handful of his current and former students have rendered a ‘usable past’, would not necessarily be classified under the category of ‘artistic’, or even ‘artFUL’. However, by choosing to examine a number of human-made (or human-modified) things, the graduate school historians have successfully investigated a ‘suggestive rather than complete’ symbiosis between American culture, from its beginnings through the present day, and the objects’ expressiveness of that same culture. Whether the product of this relationship is to be rendered in art-specific terms is up to the analyst’s test and certainly his or her respective knowledge of art.
Out of the thirteen essays collected, I found the one titled ‘Lubrications on a Lava Lamp: Technology, Counterculture, and Containment in the American Sixties’ most accessible. Since I am a child of late sixties and early seventies transatlantic hippies, proud owners of an original Lava Lite® lamp, I was more than excited about the prospects of looking closely into this ‘retro’ gadget’s historical impact. My general impressions of both the essay’s content and its author, Jennifer L. Roberts, coincide with my understanding of the so-called Prownian analysis, a methodological approach forged over time by Professor Prown as best befitting his graduate seminar on material culture. I must admit that I was quite taken by the overall layout of the collection, both structurally and thematically, as well as with the possibility of having one’s work published (in such a format) while still a grad student with long years of scholarly toil ahead. Despite the instrumental introduction to the book’s essays, provided by the second editor, Kenneth Haltman, it seems to me that ‘the theoretical underpinnings’ of the Prownian analysis, disregarding their usefulness in research tactics, have laid too burdensome of a weight on Ms Roberts’ disclosure of the Lava Lamp’s repose in our midst.
What begins as an insightful journey into the world of a sixties’ psychedelic beacon, gets somehow sidetracked into the realm of elusive speculation, layer after layer of evocative language and yet difficult to follow. Putting the schematics for the Prownian analysis aside, Ms Roberts; essay on the possible connections existing between the 1960s American mainstream culture and counterculture, on the one hand, and the lamp’s design as well as its contained meaning, on the other, divides itself in two distinct parts. In the first part of the essay, which if we were to apply the Prownian analysis would account for the description, deduction and related speculation regarding the Lava Lamp’s material being, is a simple, yet instructive way of examining the lamp’s history. I commend Ms Roberts on her mastery in transforming the lamp’s material existence into a verbatim account of it. A truly remarkable spin on the descriptive nature of the English lexicon. But all of the presented discourse’s clarity seems to end after Roberts enquires about the lamp’s position (that is, location) on the continuum between technology and counterculture. As important as this semi-rhetorical question poses to be for Ms Roberts’s interpretative analysis, she takes more than her time to come to a possible answer for it.
I am aware of Professor Prown’s cautionary words in the Preface to the volume, conceding the exploratory nature of the essays; moreover, their polished incompleteness. It is not the incompleteness of the piece that baffles me still but rather the incoherency of thought on behalf of the author that brings us to that incompleteness. Building up support for her claim that ‘although itself a piece of technology, it [the Lava Lamp] does seem to enjoy a certain autonomy from the technological form,’ Ms Roberts takes her readers on an incongruously shifting quest for the lamp’s organic and mechanical meanings. (174, brackets added) Even though most of the parts of her speculative explanation are otherwise well-written passages of researched material (her invocation of the cultural theorist Marshall McLuhan and the linguist Julia Krsteva certainly point to a well-read scholarly mind), they do not amount to a fluidly coherent second part. As the lamp undulates between meanings, so does the writer undulate between too many derivations of an original idea for the Lava Lamp’s cultural interpretation. In other words, the constraints of the Prownian analysis contain the lamp’s ‘double miracle’; that is, instead of bringing it back to life, again, for us the readers, these same constraints prevent us from reading through the writer’s path in the maize of her interpretative analysis.
All things considered, the essay by Ms Roberts is a bold attempt at crossing and forcefully merging (from time to time) the lamp’s sixties appeal with that of today, through the entrapments of technology and the dominant culture’s domestication of the amorphous force of the lamp, rendering it both a containment and a sublimation of the threatening power of the sixties’ counterculture the lamp came to represent.
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