“The Automats of the early 20th century have disappeared from Gotham's cityscape. Now, New York Design Architects has brought the retro concept roaring back, 24-7, at Bamn! Fronting the kitchen of the 350-square-foot storefront is a curving wall of plasterboard with rows of coin-operated stainless-steel doors with glass windows. Each compartment houses an individual portion of comfort food with an international twist. Eight quarters get you a warm pork bun or a PB and J empanada. Change machine on-site.” Craig Kellogg, “Horn & Who?,” Interior Design (September 1, 2006).
Among the many divine consumer spaces in Manhattan’s Lower East Side the BAMN! Automat is a particularly fascinating emplacement. It realizes, most spectacularly, the absurd truth that any palpable separation between Capital’s material and aesthetic dimensions has been eliminated. The commodity no longer obscures the social labor invested in it; this productive process is in fact transparent and moreover forms the basis of the Automat’s discreet appeal –“the peculiar social character of the labour that produces them” emerges in the act of exchange between consumer and automata.[i]
Marx lets us know in The Grundrisse that the process of automation is necessarily extended into the visual: “the full development of capital” occurs when “the entire production process appears as not subsumed under the direct skillfulness of the worker, but rather as the technological application of science.”[ii] The aestheticization of automation is thus the expression of Capital fetishizing itself. Automated production gives rise to automated consumption; modes of presentation allow for the automation of desire. BAMN! confidently proclaims that inside “satisfaction is automatic!,” reassuring us of their efficient use of the machine to subordinate desire to Capital’s regulatory flow.
Just as automated machinery consumes the labor energy of the worker—as opposed to the worker consuming the machine as the “material element of his productive activity”[iii]—the technology of the automat works over the consumer. The bliss of “instant foodification”[iv] is produced by the actual placement of the machinery, not by the active seeking out of the establishment: convenience trumps luxury in the instance of augmented survival. Automat foodification embodies the “ghostly objectivity”[v] of the commodity that forces itself upon you by its own volition. Given this consumer-culinary administration BAMN! appears as but one point in the circuit through which bodies flow in the Manhattan nine to five or in the Lower East Side shopping spree. For the lunch-breaker and dedicated shopper, BAMN! is a locus of productive consumption, a site in which human throughputs receive an investment of caloric energy and tender impersonality that keeps them on track.
The exhibitions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries employed similar architechnological principles to demonstrate the most up-to-date capabilities to produce, organize, and present the commodity object. BAMN!’s compartmentalization, its geometric structuring of products behind glass, these are the same techniques applied by the engineers of London’s Crystal Palace that was built in 1851 and two years later New York’s Exhibition of the Industry of All Nations or Worlds Fair. In contemplating of the architecture of nineteenth century commodity spaces, Walter Benjamin observes “such technological derivation seems actually to become the signature of everything now produced.”[vi] The nostalgia industry co-opts the historical-material experience and subsequently displaces the dialectic into the realm of ideology. Just as “slavery cannot be abolished without the steam-engine,” consumption cannot be held as slave to the rate-limiting factors of production and distribution and must instrumentalist all technological forms so as not to lag behind itself.[vii] The formal construction of BAMN! invigorates a retro sensibility but it simultaneously cannot help to epitomize the hyper-modern dream—a dialectical hallucination of converging pasts and futures.
“People want the convenience of choice without having to interact with another human being, which may cause a delay or confusion.” Robert Kwak, co-founder of BAMN!
This “taste of history” is riddled with theological niceties, its fetish-face grinning at every turn. In BAMN! the consumer stands in front of the goods as if in a dream: self-produced commodities sequestered among themselves behind glass; communicating in the language of exchange value; disorienting the consumer as he is sucked into an atemporal maelstrom of past, present and future. Operating in this “ghostly objectivity” BAMN! serves to aestheticize the banal within the framework of a retro scenario, feeding off a nostalgia for antiquated culinary administration by offering just that in updated form. In this way the automat revival has literally reinvented the mediocre. Unlike the exhibitions, the techno-aesthetic display of BAMN! is already integrated into everyday life; fulfillment lies in the immediate gratification of experiencing the future of food service with the “warmth” of the past. At BAMN! the quotidian holds a mirror up to itself and loves what it sees.
Ginsberg, the quotable auto-poet tells us: “There is nothing to be learned from history anymore. We're in science fiction now."
New York, Capital of the twenty-first century. Today’s neo-Boheme post-Punk can navigate the experiences of Allen Ginsberg and Yoko Ono in the same space but adapted to suit the demands of late-spectacular society. The same strip of sidewalk that is home to BAMN! narrates the transformation of New York City’s urbane intellectual yet transgressive counter-cultural elite. Everything is now profanely illuminated, obscene, stainless.
The opening of BAMN! is announced with the following headline: “Modern Asian Flavors Behind Glass Doors in the East Village.” Florence Fabricant, The New York Times (August 30, 2006).
The exhibition’s organizing of commodities from around the world engages a narrative that solidifies the position of the Western Metropol as locus in the global circulation of cultural Capital. Benjamin notes of the 1867 Paris exhibition “the ‘oriental quarter’ was the center of attraction.”[viii] However, today when we find this same thematization of commodity objects at work—Japanese, Chinese, Thai, ‘Asian Fusion,’ and Middle-Eastern cuisine; cultural goods from Japan, Tibet, and Others–it is inevitably re-inscribed with an appeal to the tradition of the dropout generation; specters of celebrities whose rebellious appropriation of non-Western spirituality and modes of existence was always doomed to the irony presented by Enlightened Capitalism.
The global triumph of general equivalence: foods of the world present themselves within the same frame of speculation. BAMN! is Epcot Center’s dining panorama consolidated, with representative “dishes” just inches apart.
“The dreaming collective knows no history. Events pass before it as always identical and always new.” Walter Benjamin, Arcades Project, [S2,1].
“They say everything old is new again.” The Today Show’s Natalie Morales on the opening of BAMN!
Walking down St. Mark’s Place one is continually struck by the products, some of which have made their way out onto the sidewalk. This unrelenting stimulus provides no relief for reflection, the consumer is merely driven forward on the plane of linear, homogenous time.
From the Indymedia.org NYC discussion forum:
Jan 23, 2006 04:54PM EST
EH: Speaking of Anarchy... I remember a cafe between St. Marks & 9th St. across from Cooper Union that was called Anarchy Cafe. Any relation to Anarchism or was this place just using the name? This was around 1995 or so. Unfortunately it was replaced by McDonalds.
Jan 23, 2006 10:26PM EST
Tommy NYC: Anarchy Cafe was a bad faux french fin-de-siecle cabaret themed yuppie bar. You didn't miss anything!
“Naturally,” writes Benjamin, “one can say that the bourgeois comfort of the dining room has survived longest in small cafés.”[ix] Looking east out the window of Starbucks on Astor Pl. one sees how this continuity of comfort is manifest in the urban landscape; whether queuing for a Macchiato or sitting at the counter multitasking, the floor to ceiling windows permit clear visual access to the nearest Starbucks, located a mere 482 ft. from where you currently are. Arriving at the second location, the storefront previously home to the Anarchy Café comes into view. At any rate, you are no more than .3 miles west from the ‘comfort food’ to be procured at BAMN! for eight quarters.[x]
[i] Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: Norton, 1978), 294-438.
[ii][ii] Marx, The Grundrisse, in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: Norton, 1978), 221-293. [emphasis added]
[iii] Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevil McLaughlin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), [G12a,3].
[iv] Julib.com. This is Juli B. in her review of BAMN! (Get foodified.)
[v] Benjamin, The Arcades Project, [G5,1].
[vi] Ibid., [F3a,5].
[vii] Marx, The German Ideology, in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: Norton, 1978), 146-202.
[viii] Benjamin, Arcades Project, [G8a,3].
[ix] Ibid., [G1,2].
[x] Distance calculations provided by Google Maps.
2 comments:
I checked it out over break and noticed an interesting feature of BAMN! you may have overlooked: they have two full time employees on duty, to break twenties and sell soft-serve ice cream. I exchanged a bill for coins from a lady behind a register and then proceeded to buy fried chicken from the machines. The 50s New York automat made for the perfect Burroughs junkie haunt, an unsupervised space where you could score dope, free spoons, a tunafish sandwich and loiter without shame. Not only the sleek neon pop art designeyness but the presence of supervisors at BAMN! make it a space completely separate from what beat nostalgia hounds are looking to find. Yet, then again BAMN! really has nothing to do with nostalgia at all. Nowhere in their mission statements do they refer to the old New York institution they’re distantly approximating – it’s as if the automat is another unbelievably backwards Japanese import to the east village (which ironically, like many japanophile St. Mark’s businesses, is patronized by Japanese tourists). BAMN! is recycling the past’s anticipations of the future, and doesn’t let the NYU kids in on the joke.
Congratulations, guys, this is a much improved version of St. Marx Place. Kudos, too, to Jake, for his penetrating addendum. It is truly bizarre the degree to which Hello Kitty has come to dominate the central brunching corridor of Village post-punk, post-grunge consumerist Panarchy.
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