The Kalahari Resort and the Interiority of Cultural Reproduction
Presented at the Yale University Art History Department, for the Americanist Symposium (April 2018)
Though the many regions of the world have developed rich and distinct cultures of their own over time, artifacts can only reveal a modicum of their essences. However, the history of the Western display of power can, in part, be understood as the misguided attempt to disprove this claim.
Fields as disparate as archaeology and infrastructural engineering advanced significantly in the pursuit of artifactual collection and study. Many of the advancements in boat engineering can be attributed to the transcontinental shipment of ancient Egyptian obelisks, while entire schools of painting have been singularly devoted to idealized depictions of landscapes too far to be seen more than once in a lifetime.
The appreciation of these artifacts led to advancements in the methods of their display in single settings. One of the earliest is the ‘cabinet of curiosities,’ with examples produced in Europe as early as the 16th century. Less museological than spectacular, these furniture pieces provided insights for later attempts to condense the world in larger settings.
In the 19th century, the World’s Fair method of exhibition was developed as a new method for the consolidation of disparate cultural sites within the architectural interior. However, their representation in confined spaces still required a significant amount of editing. Only the most exemplary artifacts were given attention in the representation of world cultures in the World’s Fair exhibition type, while the less distinct gestures and customs of each region were either cast aside or willfully overlooked.
As the world was said to have become ‘smaller’ in the postcolonial era, the past that lay before it became more complex, thus inspiring the gradual transition from an accurate reflection of history to its fabrication through nostalgic reproduction. When studying contemporary forms of this type of reproduction, as they have been afforded mediation by architectural interiors, it is useful to look back at the history of the World’s Fair exhibition type that inspired them.
In its eight months of operation, more than six million visitors attended ‘The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations’ - otherwise known as The Great Exhibition. Held in London’s Hyde Park, the exhibition was an interiorized version of the more familiar event spaces of the time, such as the marketplace and the bazaar. It was arranged as a museum of potential investments, with the intention of, in the words of a then-contemporary newspaper article, “exhibit[ing] all the productions of nature and art, and a universal competition to bring out all the powers in man in whatever concerns his material welfare.”
Towering above its many venues was the iconic glass and steel container known as the Crystal Palace, designed by the landscape architect and horticulturist Joseph Paxton. An unknown German visitor’s description of her family’s visit captures the sensation of witnessing the extraordinary structure as the exhibition took place:
“We see a delicate network of lines without any clue by means of which we might judge their distance from the eye or the real size. The side walls are too far apart to be embraced in a single glance. Instead of moving from the wall at one end to that at the other, the eye sweeps along an unending perspective which fades into the horizon. We cannot tell if the structure towers a hundred or a thousand feet above us, or whether the roof is a flat platform or is made from a succession of ridges, for there is no play of shadows to enable our optic nerves to gauge the measurements … it is a sober economy of language if I call the spectacle incomparable and fairylike. It is a midsummer night’s dream seen in the clear light of midday.”
The building’s impressive size and structural uniformity was a necessary foil to the myriad objects on display within its confines. The kaleidoscope of swaying flags lining the waist of the structure belied the highly specific intention of The Great Exhibition, as it was less an overview of the rich history of the cultures around the world than a vast spatial catalogue for investors and business magnates. Within the enclosure of the Crystal Palace, as the historian Adam Young argues, “capitalist expansion was dependent upon communicative compression.” In short, The Great Exhibition almost exclusively prioritized the future of these regions rather than their pasts.
The world’s fairs established after The Great Exhibition continued to invest in the potential future industries of world cultures as they also began to focus on their pasts. A public interest in ethnography became the second burgeoning subject of display at subsequent world’s fairs, eliciting an aesthetic mixture of technological futurism and mythological nostalgia.
The United States was the site of many world’s fairs shortly following the inarguable success of London’s Great Exhibition. The anniversaries of America’s formative years were the convenient alibis for many expositions, most of which proudly celebrated its land’s own history as a colonized territory. The scale and method of display for Chicago’s 1893 Columbian Exposition, for instance, significantly influenced many of the world’s fairs to follow, as well as many other sites of world condensation.
Surviving photos reveal the interiors of the Columbian Exposition as rich and sensational environments, constituted by many full-scale buildings of varying stylistic origins, side by side down enormous corridors underneath lofty hangars. While the first world’s fair was organized as a multicultural free-trade zone, the Columbian Exposition more literally resembled a condensed version of the built world. Many of the fair’s buildings were immense warehouse-like structures, visually tying its many architectural elements together while also sheltering them from the strong Chicago winds. Though, upon closer inspection, the building facades protected inside these buildings almost exclusively represented then-contemporary architecture of American and European descent.
A mile-long outdoor strip on the Western side of the site, known as the ‘Midway Plaisance,’ featured displays and performances almost entirely representing colonized and otherwise foreign territories. The people native to these regions, including Kwakiutl Native Americans and Persian sword dancers, were dressed in antiquated costumes by the exposition’s curators, bto perform in an outdoor circus along the axial strip.
“As a collective phenomenon,” The historian Curtis Hinsley argues, many of the world’s fairs following the Great Exhibition “celebrated the ascension of civilized power over [colonized states]… exhibition techniques tended to represent those peoples as raw materials.” Through the transparent expression of power over people and things, “virtually all fairs embodied these two aspects: displays of industrial achievement and promise for the regional or national metropolis, and exhibits of [foreign] “others” collected from peripheral territories or colonies.” At the Columbian Exposition, the indoors became the sites of the Western ‘future,’ as manifested by technology and aesthetics, while the outdoor spaces were those of the mythological non-Western ‘past,’ thus spatializing the distinction often made between the “exotic” and the “domestic.”
In the 20th century, as the world’s fair exhibition type struggled to compete with both the allure of international travel and increasingly immersive media, a baton was passed on to the theme park, a type of world building more suited to the spectacular. Though the 1964 New York World’s Fair was one of the first expositions to cost significantly more than it recovered, and was therefore one of the last of its kind, it is at least memorable for the debut of a single attraction.
In its first year of operation, Walt Disney’s ‘It’s a Small World’ guided more than 10 million visitors by boat through a serpentine path of self-defined multicultural unity. Disney’s contribution responded to the theme of the world’s fair, “peace through understanding,” by producing a highly immersive image of world peace: a wrap-around facade of “every corner of the Earth” setting the stage for over 300 audio-animatronic children, united in the imaginary past to provide a template for the imaginary future, singing the praises of universal harmony in blissful repetition.
The original ride was divided into “The Seven Seaways,” a representation of the world’s major territories as conceived by its developers: North America, Scandinavia, Europe, Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Oceania. The scenery of each zone was as flat as a stage set and operated in much the same way from the vantage point of the guiding boats.
Each of the Seven Seaways was equally presented as pre-modern versions of themselves, including those that had been presented as ‘advanced’ in previous world’s fairs: North America’s scene was not depicted as the world power it became in the 20th century, but rather as the mythological Wild West’ of the 19th, while that of Germany was more scenically Bavarian than industrially cosmopolitan.
‘Small World,’ as a microcosm of the New York World’s Fair, represented a significant shift away from the spatial distinction between global cultures often made at previous World’s Fairs. Through an embedding of novel technology within globally familiar imagery, the representations of the Western and the non-Western equally took place within the architectural interior, unified by air-conditioning.
The use of the architectural interior for world condensation generalized here bears three distinct models for the postcolonial world: the Great Exhibition imagined it as a consolidation of the global system of exchange, the Columbian Exposition a demonstrable exertion of power over unlike territories, and the New York World’s Fair a nostalgic template for future world peace. Together, they make evident the gradually increasing fabrication of history and global relations, as well as the use of the architectural interior for cultural reproduction. World’s Fairs influenced a number of building types developed in the 20th century, such as hotels, malls, airports and casinos.
But perhaps the most telling in America today is the themed indoor water park, for its ability to not only reproduce idealized times and places, but also climates in unified and controlled settings. Financed by the Nelson family, the Kalahari Resorts company has constructed several of the largest indoor water parks in North America in the last decade, each one designed entirely within a broadly African theme. With locations all across America including Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, the Kalahari Resorts combine the three models of world condensing.
First, the water parks are the prime entertainment spaces of larger hotel and business meeting complexes, making them one of the centers of commercial exchange in North America.
Second, their expressed interest in ethnography, through the display of centuries-old artifacts lining the hallways, is more visibly a demonstration of their assumed control over the regions from which these artifacts were taken.
Third, their decoration reflects a pre-historical version of an entire continent by treating it as a single culture entirely reducible to its artifacts and its imagery.
The fabrication of history and the appropriation of material artifacts are just as productive at the Kalahari Resorts as they are in its precedents, and here take on a new layer of complexity: where the term ‘nostalgia’ has often reflected a longing for a semi-imaginary space and time, here it also includes the climate. While the buildings of African climates are undoubtedly distinct from those of more frigid areas - without the snow to whisk away and the below-freezing temperatures to combat - the buildings within the Kalahari Resorts are only competing with the occasional spike in temperature caused by momentary air-conditioning malfunctions.
The image of a climatically stable Africa is especially troublesome in the 21st century, given the effects of environmental degradation in parts of the continent fossilized by the Kalahari Resorts. The current water shortage crisis facing South Africa’s Cape Town, a city of over four million people and a robust economy, is presented in the media through an aesthetics of drought and crisis, entirely distinct from the aesthetics of abundance and splendor present at the Kalahari Resorts.
Like the imagined buildings and rituals on display in every former world-condensing project, an idealistically stable climate is given permanent residence through the interiority of cultural reproduction. The consolidation of exchange, the demonstration of power and the fabrication of cultural relationships have all been exercised as persuasive models of the interiorized world to support the basic principles of Western modernity. The Kalahari Resorts and other contemporary sites of architectural interiority adopt these three models to provide mediation between themselves and the places they represent.
Though the fates of history, nostalgia, the local and the distant remain unclear, their tension most visibly hangs in the balance between the culturally reproductive interior and the increasingly threatened cultures beyond its perimeter it has long determined to reproduce.
