T HE DRY C L E A N E R
Re-Construed: The Dry Cleaner as a SocioSpatial Vertex
26 Asger Jorn, ‘Architecture for Life’, Potlatch #15, 1954.
27 Stanley Milgram, ‘The Familiar Stranger: An Aspect of Urban Anonymity’, in The Individual in a Social World: Essays and Experiments, ed. by Thomas Blass, 3rd Revised edition (London: Pinter & Martin Ltd., 2010). 28 Here I address the polynuclear in an urban setting, rather than the suburban version addressed in: Tom Nielsen, ‘Formløs: den moderne bys overskudslandskaber’ (Arkitektskolens Forlag, 2001); Tom Nielsen, ‘The Polymorphic, Multilayered and Networked Urbanised Territory’, Geografisk Tidsskrift-Danish Journal of Geography, 115.2 (2015), 88–104. 29 This will be dealt with in the forthcoming chapter ’Socio-Spatial Laundry Landscapes’.
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Apart from its utilitarian function, the dry cleaner evidently has other functions and practical use echoing Asger Jorn26 and the situationist movement. It is not simply cleaning clothes but is a social vertex: understood as an anchor point between (physical and non-physical) trajectories that is part of the overall structuring of the everyday social topography. Here, people coexist and interact on an informal level, and events unfold, in real time (spatial) and deposits over time (temporal). There is the direct face-to-face encounters with the familiar strangers27 of the neighbourhood that happen in real time. Here, the dry cleaner is part of a larger polynuclear network28 of infraordinary urban vertices (delis, cafés, diners, dwellings, work, leisure, grocery stores, etc.) that structure our everyday trajectories and experiences. The dry cleaner is, opposite the Laundromat29, not a space that you stay, but a place that ‘you pass by’ to pick up or drop off items—and thus could be understood primarily as an appendage of the street, an extension of the public realm. The direct interaction in this place is primarily with the proprietor and perhaps through chance encounters with acquaintances while waiting in line or in the doorway.
Infraordinary Socio-Spatial Interface However, we also engage with the space itself, which could be understood as a physical interface, facilitating indirect encounters with others through objects and material deposits. Deposits over time are the objects, artefacts and/or traces that is witnessing of the existence of other people who occupied the space previously. These deposits hint of the (non-)events that took place, inside the space itself, but more importantly, these deposits often refer to events that took place elsewhere. For instance, the traces and stains on a shirt suggest what happened in the private realm. Conversely, these deposits could also hint at events that have not happened yet but are anticipated by the constellation of elements, such as a wedding dress or suit prepared for events to come. Obviously, in this case, the deposited clothes are the strongest signifiers. A particular suit, a pair of wornout trousers, coloured shirts—all these, some more than others, feed our imagination of other
realities parallel to that of our own: people, events, micro-histories. Perhaps, this is not consciously perceived by most (and may even seem almost delirious), but the scenography of our everyday plays an important role in our perceived societal life-world.
Urban Vitrine: Reading the Neighbourhood This is a place of depositions over time. An accumulation of matter, like sediments washed up ashore, just to be engulfed again by the sea soon after. People deposit their personal belongings, leaving them for full display in a partly public space. A day or more goes by, where the items travels the space of the dry cleaner and the hands of the staff until finally they return to their destined wardrobe, walk-incloset, coat stand or hook somewhere behind locked doors and solid walls. Just to wait for dust and dirt to accumulate and stains to appear yet again.30 The window of the shop front itself can be perceived as an urban vitrine, from where one can read the surrounding neighbourhood like a chart or diagram from the street: similar to museum dioramas displaying historical artefacts. The dry cleaners are implosions of the local neighbourhood—an inward concentration of matter and energy—through the collection of items belonging to the neighbouring inhabitants and could thus be understood as a visual résumé or aesthetic chart of the particular area. The transient nature of the deposited items makes this space constantly transform into new constellations, day by day. It is a repository of private items meticulously lined up in this intermediate space between the public and semi-private realm, to the full display for the by-passers. We only need a quick glance at Atget’s photographs of Parisian shop fronts before realising that these documents are evidence or representations of a specific place and time in history, not only through the shop fronts but also the montage of ordinary objects that it frames. In these photographs, void of people, ‘objects take on an unwonted density, an uncanny presence.’31 The constellations of objects depicted hint of the temporal presence of other people, yet without exposing them directly. In the same way, although harder to see because we are biased by our own habitual experience, the contemporary shop-front windows of dry cleaners with their montage of clothing items tell us something about the location, the people, the gender, the culture,
30 Lunde Nielsen, Tongue of the Dry Cleaner, p. 11.
31 Eugène Atget and Laure Beaumont-Maillet, (London: Thames and Hudson, 1993), p. x.