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ability, whilst diffuse symbols work on a more unconscious level
and can be recognised intuitively. An example for a condensed
symbol is the percentage sign. When we see it in the show
window, we become instantaneously aware that we are encountering
a sale. What Turner described as the threshold state
can be categorised as diffuse symbols. Darkness, nakedness,
disorder are more universal and intuitive images, and cannot be
attributed to the seasonal sale alone. But especially these diffuse
symbols are important for achieving impact. This takes us back
to the early stage of window dressing. Here we find evidence of
considerations for using disorder as an impressive element of
design in the show window:
“A kind of confusion of inanimate goods; it seems as if a box or
suitcase full of goods has been turned upside down. Compared
to the fact that the showcase always presents its goods in symmetrical
order, this, too, seems to create an impact.” 162
This merchandising advice shows that the effect of disorder
relies on the interruption of everyday beauty. Although we have
found no examples for it here, we can point out that the strategy
of ugliness has long been known as a way of creating an impact
on the consumer. 163 While all other counsel, such as using the
mass effect of equal merchandise or staging a single piece on a
pedestal, amounts to dramatising the commodity fetish, randomness
and ugliness stand out depending on the way merchandise
is treated under normal circumstances. The accidental character
of overturned merchandise on the floor of the show window
stands in contradiction to the everyday practice of showing
goods as fetishes. 164 In this context, the compulsive beauty of the
show window finds its rival in the domain of ugliness, both used
to attract attention and business. There is, of course, a difference
between the reception of ugliness at the beginning of the twentieth
century and today. Especially modernist movements of art
like Dada, Surrealism and Nouveau Realisme were responsible
for a much wider aesthetic experience in the field of art. Thus,
the beauty of ugliness also found its way into the archives of art.
Well-dressed show windows today can therefore use strategies
of ugliness as well. But the ugly was never a mass phenomenon
162 Austerlitz (1904:89)*.
163 Randomness as strategy in art was to become important in Surrealism.
164 Randomness, uncertainty and suddenness are the three categories of evil according to Nietzsche (Liessmann (2000:327)).
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