Display glass in department stores created the modern distance between onlooker and object

Evidence

The Egyptian accounts of Europe contain several descriptions of these mechanical worlds-in-miniature, where the real world, as at the exhibition, was something created in the representation of its commodities. The department stores were described as ‘large and well organised’, with their merchandise ‘arranged in perfect order, set in rows on shelves with everything symmetrical and precisely positioned’. Non-European visitors would remark especially on the panes of glass, inside the stores and along the gas-lit arcades, which separated the observer from the goods on display. ‘The merchandise is all arranged behind sheets of clear glass, in the most remarkable order … Its dazzling appearance draws thousands of onlookers.’ The glass panes inserted themselves between the visitors and the goods on display, making the former into mere onlookers and endowing the goods with the distance that is the source of their objectness. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 77

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the rubric’s existing interest in how built material form shapes perception — parallels the window-glass arguments in urban design and commodity fetishism literature (Benjamin’s arcades).
• SEED: Angle: the humble pane of glass as a colonial-technology of spectatorship — how ‘objectness’ itself was manufactured for non-European visitors to Europe.