ABSTRACT

In recent years, scholars have paid increasing attention to the histories of waiting, particularly in medicine, business, politics, and culture. This essay contributes to that history by tracing the evolving visual representation of waiting in popular American culture between 1870 and 1930. As contemporary illustrators, photographers and artists interpreted a metropolitan landscape populated by waiting subjects, they helped inscribe an increasingly routine experience with an enduring set of meanings – efficiency, convenience, equality, comfort, and alienation, for instance – while at the same time drawing upon and reinventing older visual traditions of social representation. The original subjects of waiting imagery were queues, which cartoonists and sketch artists used to imagine the shifting boundaries of citizenship. As urban realism and ‘muckraking’ came into vogue in the century’s final decades, the imagery of waiting shifted from allegorical queues to literal scenes of migration, poverty and unemployment. In the twentieth century, the archetypal scene of waiting shifted once again, this time to a more consumer-oriented landscape of monumental railroad stations, department store waiting rooms, and private and public bureaucratic spaces. By the 1920s, this article concludes, waiting imagery had transitioned from a tool of critique – a means of articulating social crisis – into a common advertising trope. This article attempts a thematic rather than formal analysis of the origins of that trope, in order to reveal how slowness, as much as speed and acceleration, became an essential part of the modernizing United States’ self-image.

摘要

近年来，学者们越来越关注等待的历史，特别是在医学、商业、政治和文化方面。这篇文章通过追溯 1870 年至 1930 年间美国流行文化中不断演变的视觉表现形式，为这段历史做出了贡献。当当代插画家、摄影师和艺术家诠释了由等待主题组成的大都市景观时，他们帮助铭刻了一种越来越常规的体验和一个经久不衰的场景意义——例如效率、便利、平等、舒适和疏离——同时借鉴和重塑旧的社会表现视觉传统。等待图像的最初主题是排队，漫画家和素描艺术家用它来想象公民身份界限的变化。随着城市现实主义和“挖坑”在本世纪最后几十年开始流行，等待的意象从寓言式的排队转变为移民、贫困和失业的真实场景。在 20 世纪，等待的典型场景再次发生转变，这一次转向更加面向消费者的景观，包括巨大的火车站、百货商店候车室以及私人和公共官僚空间。本文总结说，到 1920 年代，等待的意象已经从一种批评工具——一种表达社会危机的手段——转变为一种常见的广告比喻。本文试图对这个比喻的起源进行主题而非形式分析，以揭示缓慢以及速度和加速度如何成为现代化美国自我形象的重要组成部分。