No, don’t turn the hardware shop into a Toy Emporium, but, as I say, bring in one or two new and imaginative Japanese inspirations per month, retiring the old, and you’ve got that added éclat every shop yearns for.
But… attendez!
I have saved the best for last.
Consider the territory underfoot, the floor of our not-so-far future fish-hook and Singer sewing-machine-bobbin’ emporium.
Why, look. Can it be? It is!
The Floor Is Transparent
Laid out in largish squares of see-through plastic glass, it is an immense film, tape or TV screen on which images can be projected from below!
Entering the shop at high noon or dinner time (best time to shop when all those damn fool customers won’t get in the way) you walk on firefalls of lava, erupting volcanoes, Dante’s hell-factory poured steel and red-hot ironworks. All the fires on earth, earth-born or man-made furnaces, are there to tread. You walk the white-hot coals where the metal emerges to become all the stuffs in the magical windows outside, or laid out in laser-beam explosions up above.
You are seemingly suspended then on a history of mankind’s attraction to, conquering, and usage of—fire. Over there, an ancient cave fire-shadows a stone wall. Next over, the flames that baked the brick cities of Babylon and Athens and Rome, and shaped the weapons that locust-scourged the air. And here the Renaissance bonfires that ignited knowledge and illuminated history. And just next, the simple straw blazes that exhaled warm breath to fill paper pears and lift the Montgolfier brothers into the skies over France.
And here the thunderous exhaust of the Apollo rockets, with their bright roars, heading back up to the first fire, our sun.
Well now, by God, don’t tell me you won’t rise at midnight to go barefoot on that Hindu fakir’s fire-walking hot-dog bed.
Frame the whole picture again. The fabulous harvest bins of eager and itching tools, the cobra viper pits, the attic filled with a history of discards, the basement waiting with its winepresses, and the transparent floor to Caesar-stride as you load up with goodies and wander home, wondering what hit you.
Would you not, once home, dial a number and say, “Sorry, Ralph. Know it’s late. But, I just came back from walking half an acre of blazing charcoal, fireflies, and the great Andromeda nebula. The address? Well—”
Well, there you have it. I told you I would not, like Peter O’Toole, build you a better camel or even a greater nation.
But I can dream you a new home away from home.
And send you off with a pocket full of jingling brass and a mouthful of nails.
This way to the lovely mad house.
THE AESTHETICS OF SIZE
From the ridiculous to the magnificent to the sublime.
From King Kong to Apollo 11 to Michelangelo.
By what route, under what circumstance?
I have often told friends to go see King Kong, the terrific, the wondrous.
Nonsense! they cry, having seen him. Not so!
Indeed not, I respond. Because you saw Kong only on a home television screen. My 50-foot ape was chopped down to your 12-inch-high dwarf.
Similarly, space travel from Canaveral to the Moon and Mars is starved and withered, the great candle melted, giving up three hundred long feet to matinee star in Hop O’ My Thumb.
Kong belongs on cinema walls, in his proper dimension.
Apollo II should climb the stars in Imax or Omnimax theaters.
And how does this Aesthetic of Size apply to Michelangelo, Titian or Raphael?
Viewed in the galleries where they hang, full-size in multifold glories, one thing.
Up close, in library books, another.
Wrong size.
The trouble is you hold art in your hands. But, consider, shouldn’t it be that the art within those books should hold you in its hands?
May I solve the problem?
Let us build the first color-slide projection art gallery in history.
A good-size gallery, lit only from behind a series of twelve or fourteen projection screens. And on these screens, as we wander a room some 40- or 50-feet-long by 30-feet-wide, let us project the finest landscapes by Monet, the napes of lovely women’s necks by Manet, or the summer-ripe peach ladies of Renoir.
And all in their original size.
Which is what our slide-projection gallery is all about.
And not just a dozen Renoirs or Monets, but everything they painted or drew!
Which is the other thing our gallery would be about.
Because of the size, shape, weight and number of paintings by the world’s greatest artists, packing, shipping and hanging them by the tens of thousands is, if not impossible, incredibly expensive and time-consuming.
But, with a few small cartons of color slides, you can air-mail Picasso anywhere, set him up and have him hung within an hour.
Multiplicity is one thing. Size, to repeat myself, is another.
Your average art lover cannot possibly guess, reading the measurements of a Botticelli or Veronese coffee-table book, just how large the stunning originals are!
But now, for the first time, the non-travelers of the world will be knocked back on their heels when they enter our, you might say, camera obscura environment to find Botticelli’s Seasons towering, and Veronese’s Disciples looming, over them.
“My God!” the common cry will be, “are the great paintings of the world all that immense!?”
Not all, no. Some. Quite a few.
And heretofore unseen, or if seen, melted down to hand-mirror size and trapped in books, beautiful and small, instead of ten times more beautiful and perhaps a hundred times larger than the lives that pass through these galleries to be changed, enroute, forever.
Why bother?
Well, even in this jet-travel time, millions will not fly about the world, millions will still be stay-at-homes in 2001. It will be for them, as it was in the time of Victoria and Albert and their incredible Curators, that we will build our twilight museum. The Queen and her Prince truly cared for the general population, and so shipped home treasures to please the shopkeeper and thrill the barmaid.
Then, too, there will always be the jet-traveler, who will hunger for a large size memory refreshment. Anyone in need of a proper Monet fix, or a Seurat eye-dazzlement can ramble to our just-before-sunrise, just-after-dark-shadow gallery, and watch as a dozen and then a hundred and then a thousand bright images come up in waves, like tides on an amazingly endless shore.
Stroll in our twilight gallery and see twelve portraits for half an hour. Or touch a button, stay for three hours, and see every mind-numbing grotesque painting that Dali ever imagined while driving horizonless highways without his car.
Technical problems?
Plenty.
But we have moved into a high-tech world, where the quality of photography, color slides, projectors and screens should insure us of high-resolution delivery.
Not just another head-on slide show. But a gallery-seeming experience, where you are surrounded on all sides, by the imagination of the artist, a gymnasium where his whole life’s work can perform endlessly for art critic, passionate art lover, or your merest student from first grade to senior high.