The Twenty-First Century Tiller Girls: Natalie Bookchin's 'Mass Ornament'

Natalie Bookchin's Mass Ornament is a video installation constructed of YouTube clips of people dancing alone, in their rooms, edited together into a choreographed dance. Mass Ornament refers to Machine Age innovations like Taylorism and Fordism and the mechanized cultural forms they wrought, such as the Tiller Girls. Siegfried Kracauer, who coined the term, described it as "an exodus of individuals into anonymity, through which their nature is deprived of its substance, the mass ornament presents itself as a cult of physical culture---mythological but devoid of meaning." Kracauer warned that the spread of the mass ornament aesthetic and ideology might potentially inspire a never ending cycle of narcissistic consumption.;By editing the inherent similarities found within the YouTube clips, the dancers of Mass Ornament become a synchronized spectacle of previously individually dancing YouTubers. The collective ethos of the Tiller Girls was to present the illusion that America too, was an efficient, harmonized, and powerful force of humanity which helped ease anxieties, fears, and concerns over the chaos and corruption of the Machine Age period. This past era has much in common with current events which Bookchin draws attention to through her reinvigoration of Kracauer's theory. Bookchin's work reveals the twenty-first century version of Kracauer's mass ornament theory via the machine aesthetic of the Tiller Girls.;There are two major differences between Bookchin and Kracauer's interpretations of mass ornament ideology, however. First, the twenty-first century mass ornament is more easily reproduced, distributed and accessible than ever before. Secondly, viewers of either the YouTube videos or Mass Ornament are watching them as a separated and diffused mass ornament instead of the previous consumption as a mass crowd at a Tiller Girls performance.;Mass Ornament is an important indicator of the continuation and evolution of Fordism-inspired capitalist production and consumption. Because of the rapid convergence of hypermedia---the combined reliance on all social media---post-Fordist methods have subsequently been altered. Kracauer's concern for continual consumption of society's own image thus deserves further consideration in light of the new methods of production, consumption, and self-commodification in the twenty-first century.