Chapter Ten
Techno Beds - 1950 to the Present
As the 21st century unfolds we will see the role of the bed expand…
With people’s lives becoming increasingly busy, the bed and the bedroom
will take over from the lounge, as an area where we do…reading…
watching TV, film or listening to music. The 21st century bed may
transform into the business arena too. As well as doing more
work in bed…beds may take up residency in our offices
Dr David Holmes, social psychologist
Manchester Metropolitan University, July 2006
‘One blissful new thing about the 1960s’, says the inventor of the mini skirt, ‘was American king-size beds. All English beds were frugal, mean-sized things, but my mother-in-law, Elizabeth Plunkett Greene, who always got straight to the point, gave Alexander and me a king-sized bed as a wedding present’.*
With people’s lives becoming increasingly busy, the bed and the bedroom
will take over from the lounge, as an area where we do…reading…
watching TV, film or listening to music. The 21st century bed may
transform into the business arena too. As well as doing more
work in bed…beds may take up residency in our offices
Dr David Holmes, social psychologist
Manchester Metropolitan University, July 2006
‘One blissful new thing about the 1960s’, says the inventor of the mini skirt, ‘was American king-size beds. All English beds were frugal, mean-sized things, but my mother-in-law, Elizabeth Plunkett Greene, who always got straight to the point, gave Alexander and me a king-sized bed as a wedding present’.*
The arrival of spacious beds in the 1960s was a radical development. For over two decades many urban dwellers on both side of the Atlantic had been living in apartments and lofts, making do with single, if not convertible, beds. Even married couples appeared to sleep in single beds: in the master bedroom of the 1940s house, twin beds were an indicator of wealth and social status, partly influenced by American films. David Lean’s 1945 adaptation of Noël Coward’s comedy Blithe Spirit opens in the fashionably-decorated master bedroom of Ruth and Charles Condamine in which husband and wife have twin beds. At one end of the room is a door leading to Charles’s dressing room which contains a single bed. A survey undertaken in 1950 revealed that at the outbreak of the Second World War, only 25% of the beds bought in America were twins. By 1950 this had increased to a staggering 68%, a fact reflected in the television situation comedies of the time. The convention of placing television couples in twin beds, rather than one large double bed, adhered to contemporary morality. In the 1930s the Hayes code, a series of rules and regulations, had been introduced to moderate the actions of Hollywood film producers, stipulating that a man and woman could never be seen in the same bed. But when, on the hit American show I Love Lucy in the late 1950s spouses Lucy and Ricky Ricardo were shown sleeping in separate beds, the country was on the verge of a sexual revolution.
In the 1960s America experienced a dramatic shift in traditional values related to sex, and sexuality. The most important change was that sex became more socially acceptable outside the strict boundaries of heterosexual marriage. Studies have shown that, between 1965 and 1975, the number of women who had had sexual intercourse prior to marriage showed a marked increase. The social and political climate of the 1960s was unique; one in which traditional values were often challenged loudly by a vocal minority. The various areas of society clamouring for change included the Civil Rights movement and women, with various women's rights organisations appearing in the latter years of the decade in particular. This climate of change led many, particularly the young, to challenge the social norms. With the success that the Civil Rights movement was seen to have, others who wanted change knew that the time was ripe for them to bring it about. The combination of liberal government, general economic prosperity, and the ever-present threat of nuclear annihilation marked the 1960s apart from any decade that had come before it, and whilst conservatism was by no means dead, liberalism enjoyed a widespread revival, which helped to facilitate the climate in which the 'sexual revolution' took place.
The 1960s are seen as the first modern era of open sexuality in which the Kinsey Reports of 1948 and 1953 played a significant role. The results of these reports went some way towards making men, and particularly women, feel more comfortable about going against the grain of established sexual norms by showing that there were greater incidences of homosexuality and extramarital sex than were publicly recorded, or even generally socially accepted. This information, combined with the liberal attitudes of the 1960s, meant that more and more people, particularly women, felt an increased sexual liberation.
The advent of the birth control pill was another massively important factor in explaining the changes in sexual behaviour in the 1960s. When Lyndon Johnson became the first acting president to endorse birth control, this played a major role in liberating American sexual attitudes. Whilst men had always enjoyed some form of sexual freedom, even outside the boundaries of what would be publicly and socially acceptable, women were seen to be 'stuck' in their traditional familial, social, and sexual roles. This was due in part to fears over illegitimate pregnancy and childbirth, and social (particularly religious) qualms about contraception which was often seen to be 'messy' and unchristian. The first birth control pill for women was developed in 1957. By 1960, the Food and Drug Administration had licensed the drug. 'The Pill', as it came to be known, was extraordinarily popular, and despite worries over possible side effects, by 1962, an estimated 1,187,000 women were using it. The pill divorced contraception from the act of intercourse itself, making it more socially acceptable, and preferable to many other types of contraception (which had been around for years). Heralded as a technological marvel, the pill was a trusted product of science in an increasingly technological age, and was heralded as one of man's 'triumphs' over nature. It was often said that with the invention of the pill, the women who took it had immediately been given a new freedom - the freedom to use their bodies as they saw fit, without having to worry about the burden of unwanted pregnancy. Women's rights movements also heralded the pill as a method of granting women sexual liberation, and saw the popularity of the drug as just one signifier of the increasing desire for equality (sexual or otherwise) amongst American women. The pill and the sexual revolution was therefore an important part of the drive towards sexual equality in the 1960s.
The effect of all this on the bed was revolutionary. In the new sexually-open climate, people needed room in which to pursue their rediscovered sexuality. At the same time, people were getting taller and, following anthropometrical research, the British Council of Industrial Design (the original Design Council) recommended wider dimensions for beds. The manufacture of larger beds surged, to be swiftly followed by a huge decline in the sale of twin beds. In 1958 the Simmons Company, which had opened its first factory in Wisconsin in 1870, introduced the king and queen-size mattress which would gradually become popular across the Atlantic.
Running tandem with increases in bed size, were innovations to make beds more comfortable. In 1946 Howard Hughes, the eccentric millionaire film producer and aviator, crashed shortly after taking off for a test flight and for the remainder of his life suffered chronic pain. When he was hospitalized in 1953 with what is now known as Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy, he was shocked at how uncomfortable hospital beds were, so he instructed his company Hughes Engineers to design a prototype that would allow a person to raise their back and legs to find the most comfortable position for sleeping. The back of the electrically-controlled bed that the firm came up with could be elevated allowing gravity to aid the heart in circulation. This in turn took pressure off the hips, enabling more relaxed sleep than on a flat bed. The same year the company released the electric adjustable bed onto the market. Within months it was a bestseller.
[IMAGE 171: Charles Hall with his water-bed]
The sexual revolution of the ‘swinging sixties’ not only required beds to be bigger and more relaxing, but also more exciting and modern. The water-bed, developed for medical reasons in the closing stages of the nineteenth century and then abandoned, was resurrected in the 1960s in the form of a leak-proof PVC bag filled with water and supported in a wooden frame. It was produced by Charles Hall in 1968 while he was a design student at San Francisco State University in California But because a water-bed had already been described in two novels by fellow-American Robert A Heinlein, Hall was unable to obtain a patent. The advertising slogan that accompanied the release of the water-bed onto the market claimed it was good for two things: the first was back ache and the second was left to the public’s imagination.
Commonly known as ‘frolic beds’ in the 60s, there was said to be nothing like having sex in a water-bed, though some who used it claim it interfered with the process of intercourse. Initially water-beds were not cheap and only the very rich, such as Playboy magnate Hugh Hefner, who installed a king-size version at his mansion in Chicago, and Sheik Ahmed Zaki Yamani, the Saudi Arabian oil minister, who had one fitted in his 727 jet, could afford one. With the invention of vinyl in the late 1960s, however, the price dropped, and their use became more widespread.
Water-beds, however, had disadvantages: they could collapse floors and spring leaks which proved dangerous to the water heaters that kept the water warm. One story circulated of a couple making love in a water-bed on their balcony. The balcony collapsed as a result of the weight of the water (and possibly the couple’s lovemaking), crushing the lovers to death. More recently, the water-bed has featured as the venue for strenuous sexual exertion in a number of American movies including The Ice Storm (1997) and the Austin Powers spy spoof, Goldmember (2002). In 2004 a scientific survey conducted by the American Society for Reproductive Medical Conference in Philadelphia concluded that male water-bed users were four times more likely to have infertility problems than non-users. Despite this, water-
beds remain popular in the United States with approximately 2 million sales a year.
Water-beds, however, had disadvantages: they could collapse floors and spring leaks which proved dangerous to the water heaters that kept the water warm. One story circulated of a couple making love in a water-bed on their balcony. The balcony collapsed as a result of the weight of the water (and possibly the couple’s lovemaking), crushing the lovers to death. More recently, the water-bed has featured as the venue for strenuous sexual exertion in a number of American movies including The Ice Storm (1997) and the Austin Powers spy spoof, Goldmember (2002). In 2004 a scientific survey conducted by the American Society for Reproductive Medical Conference in Philadelphia concluded that male water-bed users were four times more likely to have infertility problems than non-users. Despite this, water-
beds remain popular in the United States with approximately 2 million sales a year.
Even before bed manufacturers realized people were spending more time in their beds for non-sleeping activities, they were using technological advances to improve bed comfort for health reasons. The increase in musculoskeletal disorders witnessed over the past forty years reflects a corresponding increase in sedentary occupations over the same period including driving; extensive use of the telephone without a headset; and word processing. According to a survey published in 2000*, almost half the adult population within the United Kingdom suffers from back pain. Affecting over a million people, it’s the nation’s leading cause of disability. 57% of those who earn their living as supermarket cashiers experience back pain, so it is not restricted to the middle classes. In the past two decades more and more companies have gone into the bed-making business and competition has resulted in the need to be more innovating in producing the most comfortable bed. In the 1980s the air bed mattress constructed of vulcanized rubber or vinyl and operated by remote control appeared. A decade later mattresses made of memory foam were released onto the market by American company Tempur-Pedic. Memory foam was originally developed by NASA to decrease the very high pressure caused by the extreme g-force occurring during the take-off of the space shuttle. It was never used in the space programme but was subsequently used medically, for example by patients who used to lie in bed on hard or very firm mattresses for long periods of time without regularly moving such as being bed-bound after a paralyzing stroke. The pressure over some of their bony regions decreased or stopped the blood flow to the region causing horrific pressure sores and/or gangrene. Memory foam mattresses helped hugely to decrease such events
[IMAGE 172: Tempur-medic memory foam mattress, 2008, bedzine.com]
Memory foam is made from polyurethane with additional chemicals that increase its viscocity level, thereby increasing its density. Depending on the chemicals used and its overall density, it is firmer in cool temperatures and softer when warm. Higher density memory foam reacts to body heat which allows it to mould itself to the shape of a warm body within a few minutes. A lower density memory foam is pressure-sensitive and will mould more quickly to the shape of the body. Usually denser than an ordinary foam mattress, memory foam versions are more supportive. Memory foam is also used to manufacture pillows to alleviate chronic neck pain.
In the past eight years enormous improvements in bed comfort have been achieved, first with the introduction of the zero gravity mattress,en with a mattress made from dispersion chambers and latex foam marketed as Flotek by Mexican company Selther. But things have moved on even further. Leggett & Platt’s Starry Night Sleep Technology Bed, which in January 2008 was on display at the International Consumer Electronics Show in Los Vegas, incorporates vibration sensors to monitor body movement and breathing patterns. If the occupant snores the bed will automatically shift and tilt until the snoring stops. The bed is divided into two sections so couples can adjust their own half and retails at between US$20,000 and US$50,000. Inbuilt air-conditioning, humidifiers, temperature controls, bedbug excluders, massage units and air filters to screen out allergens can also be operated at the touch of the remote control in what is no longer called a bed but a ‘body suspension system’.
[IMAGE 174: B.E.D., www.miamibeach411.com]
On 31 December 1999 a restaurant resembling the inside of a Buddhist temple and furnishedwith 8 square-foot, mosquito-netted beds, supported by memory foam mattresses and covered with dark brown sheets and soft pillows, was opened in Miami Beach. Since its launch, B.E.D. (Beverage, Entertainment, Dining) has proved one of the most fashionable night-spots in America attracting A-list celebrities including George Clooney, Sean Coombs and Jennifer Lopez. There are bi-nightly seatings called ‘lays’ at 8.30pm and 10.30pm, at which diners, in the tradition of their Roman ancestors, lie down to eat and drink from silver trays placed in the centre of the bed, served by a patrol of pyjama-clad waitresses. The restaurant’s fame quickly spread across America with a fictional New York branch of the restaurant being featured in an episode of TV hit Sex and the City.
In recreating the intimate setting of the bedroom, B.E.D. took what had been regarded for the past two hundred years as a private realm and dragged it into the public arena. Its exploitation of the bed as a gimmick to entice customers may hark back to historical connections with status and wealth, but has more to do with today’s ‘in-your-face’ culture where nothing is taboo, especially where it intrudes into the lives of celebrities, and can be manipulated to gain publicity for political, artistic or commercial ends and incite the required response. In June 2007 catwalk model Kate Moss and her then boyfriend Pete Doherty announced their intention to recreate John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s famous bed-in at the Glastonbury Rock Festival later that month. The idea behind it was to stage a peace protest and, more especially, to focus the media’s attention on how ineffective the recent G8 summit – a conference made up of the most powerful nations - had been in attempting to solve world issues. The bed-in was planned to form part of Doherty’s solo set on the acoustic stage and both he and Moss admitted to being influenced by the success of Lennon and Ono’s bed-in
[IMAGE 175: John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s bed-in, 1967]
When the former Beatle and his second wife decided to stage a series of bed-ins to promote world peace, the Vietnam War was in its fourteenth year. It had begun in 1954 when communist North Vietnam, supported by communist rebels from the South (the Vietcong), attempted to conquer US-backed South Vietnam and unite the country as a communist state. The division between South and North Vietnam had been a result of the break-up of French Indochina and the defeat of the French. American influence in Southeast Asia grew steadily after this time; Washington saw South Vietnam, in the context of the 1950s and the Cold War, as a buttress against the spread of communism, and advisers and military aid began to be dispatched at increasing levels to support the South Vietnamese. By 1965 the US military presence in the region amounted to 184,300 men.
There was a lot of opposition to the war, primarily amongst the young, which contributed to the emergence of a hippy culture. Hippies spoke of ‘flower power’ and wore flower garlands round their neck and flowers in their hair. Dressed in kaftans, afghan coats and body paint, they urged people to burn their draft cards as they took drugs and listened to music. In June 1967 200,000 people gathered together at the Monterey International Pop Festival in California to hear some of the grooviest groups of the day – The Who, Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin - entertain the crowds singing about music, flowers and love. The same people were also peacefully protesting against the Vietnam War. 25,000 protesters marched on Washington in 1967 - the largest anti-war rally ever to have been held in the state.
On 4 April 1967 – the year of Peace and Love - Martin Luther King denounced US military policy in Vietnam and proposed a merger of the anti-war movement and the civil rights movement. He labelled the government the ‘greatest purveyor of violence in the world’. The boxer Muhammad Ali, having refused induction to the US Army, was arrested. Shortly afterwards, the New York State Athletic Commission and the World Boxing Association suspended his boxing licence and stripped him of his heavyweight title. Ali was sentenced to five years imprisonment. April 1967 saw growing numbers of passive protest rallies, with crowds estimated at 100,000 in New York and 50,000 in San Francisco. These ‘flower children’ were sticking flowers in the barrels of guns, urging people to seek peace and ‘make love not war’. Many young men grew their hair long as part of a gesture against a masculine (military) culture which they saw as being responsible for the war in Vietnam.
It was amid this background that John Lennon and his wife Yoko Ono held their peace bed-ins. They were due to get married in March 1969 and, knowing that their wedding would be a huge media event, used the publicity to protest against the war. The conflict had now reached the height of its unpopularity; the numbers of US troops engaged in Vietnam had reached 543,400, while a staggering 33,641 Americans had been killed. During the spring of 1969 the newly-weds made a non-violent protest against the Vietnam War, by holding two week-long ‘Bed-ins for Peace’ from their hotel rooms in Amsterdam and Montreal. The stunt worked. The global media circus flocked to the couple’s bed and within hours photographs flashed across television screens and broadsheets around the world. ‘The whole effect of our bed-ins’, they said, ‘has made people talk about peace. We spent our honeymoon talking to the press in a bed in Amsterdam. For us it was the only way…bed-ins seem to be the best way’.
During Lennon and Ono’s honeymoon in Room 702 at the Amsterdam Hilton Hotel between 25 March and 31 March the world’s press was invited into their hotel room every day between 9am and 9pm. While entertaining journalists and photographers, the couple sat up in bed protesting about American intervention in Vietnam and talking about peace with signs over their bed reading ‘Hair Peace’ and ‘Bed Peace’.
Lennon wrote a song about the experience with co-BeMcCartney called The Ballad of John and Yoko. It went to Number One in June 1969 and remained there for three weeks.
Drove from Paris to the Amsterdam Hilton
Talkin' in our beds for a week
The newspeople said
Say what you doin' in bed?
I said we're only trying
To get us some peace…
Lennon and Ono may have thought of being filmed in bed because it is the place where life is created and, as such, the complete antithesis to the destructive theatre of war. It is more likely, however, that the idea of watching a man and a woman in bed on their honeymoon was chosen for its ability to shock audiences into sitting up and taking notice. When questioned about where the inspiration came from, they were not very clear. They ‘felt that it was important…to stand up for some issues’ and had worked for three months thinking out the most functional approach to boost peace before we got married. We had the idea to do the event where we stayed in bed and grew our hair…The establishment irritate you – pull your beard, flick your face – to make you fight because once they’ve got you violent they know how to handle you. The only thing they don’t know how to handle is non-violence and humour.
As to whether their actions were successful in stepping up the peace momentum, it’s hard to judge. Much of the press dismissed the exercise as a publicity stunt, and accused the perpetrators of doing it for money and attention. Lennon retorted by saying he could make more money in an hour by writing a song than he could spending a week in bed talking about peace. If the bed-ins did have an impact on the peace movement, did they serve as a catalyst or were they just part of the prevailing pro-peace lobby? This is equally difficult to gauge. The word ‘peace’ was on everyone’s lips. 500,000 people were estimated to have mobilized at an anti-war rally in Washington DC – an event that remains the largest single anti-war protest in American history. Students and civilians were in agreement: the dominating mood of the moment was anti-war and pro-peace and it was making its presence felt. In January 1970 President Nixon, in his State of the Union address, stated that bringing the war in Vietnam to an end was ‘a major goal of United States policy’.
Talkin' in our beds for a week
The newspeople said
Say what you doin' in bed?
I said we're only trying
To get us some peace…
Lennon and Ono may have thought of being filmed in bed because it is the place where life is created and, as such, the complete antithesis to the destructive theatre of war. It is more likely, however, that the idea of watching a man and a woman in bed on their honeymoon was chosen for its ability to shock audiences into sitting up and taking notice. When questioned about where the inspiration came from, they were not very clear. They ‘felt that it was important…to stand up for some issues’ and had worked for three months thinking out the most functional approach to boost peace before we got married. We had the idea to do the event where we stayed in bed and grew our hair…The establishment irritate you – pull your beard, flick your face – to make you fight because once they’ve got you violent they know how to handle you. The only thing they don’t know how to handle is non-violence and humour.
As to whether their actions were successful in stepping up the peace momentum, it’s hard to judge. Much of the press dismissed the exercise as a publicity stunt, and accused the perpetrators of doing it for money and attention. Lennon retorted by saying he could make more money in an hour by writing a song than he could spending a week in bed talking about peace. If the bed-ins did have an impact on the peace movement, did they serve as a catalyst or were they just part of the prevailing pro-peace lobby? This is equally difficult to gauge. The word ‘peace’ was on everyone’s lips. 500,000 people were estimated to have mobilized at an anti-war rally in Washington DC – an event that remains the largest single anti-war protest in American history. Students and civilians were in agreement: the dominating mood of the moment was anti-war and pro-peace and it was making its presence felt. In January 1970 President Nixon, in his State of the Union address, stated that bringing the war in Vietnam to an end was ‘a major goal of United States policy’.
[IMAGE 176: Puffy Ami Yumi’s bed-in, 2003]
Whatever Lennon and Oko’s bed-ins did or did not achieve, they would soon go down in history as an early piece of politically-motivated conceptual art that would be ‘borrowed’ by different artists. The 2003 album cover of Nice featured Ami Onuki and Yumi Yoshimura, the two members of Japanese pop group Puffy Ami Yumi, lying in bed in homage to Lennon and Ono. In 2006 Billie Joe Armstrong, lead singer of Californian punk-rock band Green Day, and his wife, Adrienne Armstrong, held a bed-in. Above their heads was a poster which read in Spanish: ‘Make Love Not War’. The same year Viva Voce produced a video featuring a hotel bed-in to protest against the evils of the record industry and the media. Both the lead singers begin by singing and playing their instruments in bed. Half way through, one of them gets up to paint the words ‘GIVE MUSIC A CHANCE’ on the wall behind her.
[IMAGE 177: Robert Rauschenberg, Bed, 1955] The idea of focusing on the bed as a work of art first came to public attention in the mid-1950s when Robert Rauschenberg took a well–worn pillow, sheet, and quilt, scribbled on them with pencil, splashed the pillow and the sheet with paint, nail varnish and toothpaste, and exhibited the work as Bed. The bedding was in fact the artist’s own, and reflected his interest in using both the every-day and the personal in his work. While many regarded it as a work of genius, others found it shocking. When it was exhibited at the first Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto, Italy, in 1958, officials removed Bed from public view and hung it in an office instead, deeming it unfit for public display. Rauschenberg’s use of the stain technique, they claimed, gave the work a violent feel, while the cover and sheets offensively suggested an absent human body. Others, however, believed that Bed symbolized the artist’s romantic relationship with fellow artist Jasper Johns: the bed quilt is turned back, inviting the viewer to climb in.
In the 1980s a number of controversial cultural issues including the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome epidemic (AIDS), abortion, sexual orientation, gender, race and homelessness, became major news stories and were highly politicised. Many artists’ lives were touched personally by these concerns and, since the bed is associated with intimacy, sexuality and privacy, it was deemed an appropriate vehicle for expressing their responses to private experience and the surrounding homophobia which intensified during the AIDS crisis. By 1980 AIDS had spread to at least five continents (North America, South America, Europe, Africa and Australia) and affected between 100,000 and 300,000 people. Described initially by the media as Gay-Related Immune Deficiency because it was originally thought to be limited to the homosexual community, the AIDS epidemic had huge political and personal impact on the art world, fostering a sense of community and commitment that encouraged many gay and lesbian artists to openly address their sexual identity. They also retained memories of partners and relatives dieing painful, protracted deaths in bed, and they wished to express their grief: ‘Once a site of private pleasure’, the bed had been ‘transformed into a memorial, a site of public pain’.* The extent of that pain and loss was conveyed in Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s installation, Untitled, in 1991. Gonzalez-Torres died of AIDS in January 1996, five years after losing his lover to the same illness. In 1991 the artist created a billboard-size photographic image of an empty double bed, its pillows and sheets dented by the bodies of a now-absent couple. By depriving the bed of the human body, the image provokes an immediate response of loss and emptiness, and compels the viewer to think about body-related issues such as gender and sexuality. Installed on the highway exactly like a vast outdoor commercial, the lonely, vacant bed symbolizes private grief and loss, but by thrusting it into the public domain, the artist transforms it into a collective experience shared by many.
[IMAGE 178: Catherine Saalfield & Zoe Leonard,
Keep Your Laws Off My Body, 1989, artists’ private collection]
Allied to the AIDS issue was the debate about gender and sexual orientation, and whether church and state should be allowed to impose restrictions on personal freedom in these areas. Catherine Saalfield and Zoe Leonard’s Keep Your Laws Off My Body comprised a videotape and a bed with silk-screened sheets and pillowcases, imprinted with text taken from restrictive US legislation. The text included measures to impede reproductive rights and the various Helms Amendments calling for the criminalization of sodomy, an end to a federally-funded AIDS programme, and the withdrawal of NEA (National Endowment for the Arts) support for ‘obscene’ art. The videotape showed footage of police in riot gear violently confronting demonstrators from the AIDS activist group ACT UP in front of New York’s City Hall, and erotic images of a lesbian couple (the artists) in bed together. As before, the vacant bed becomes a substitute for the body(ies), enabling the artist to make public statements about deeply private matters. The fact that the normally-private bed is hauled into the glare of cameras and TV monitors raises concerns, increasingly relevant today, about the growing levels of state control in our private lives. In Julia Scher’s Always There (1994), downward-angled video monitors are attached to the posts of a four-poster bed. Below each monitor is a surveillance monitor pointed at the mattress. Speakers mounted in the corners of the room in which the work is displayed play the song Always There. The sinister overtones of a Big Brother state are successfully evoked, making privacy redundant.
Black African homosexual artist Glenn Ligon addressed both race and sexuality in his work Twin which comprised a trundle-bed half pulled out from beneath a single bed. The single bed is made up with sheets, a pillowcase and a blanket whose brown, yellow and black stripes remind the viewer of prison bars, symbolizing the racial and sexual ostracization experienced by ethnic gay youths. The trundle bed is littered at one end with porn magazines depicting black and inter-racial gay sex, and beneath it the 1992 issue of Newsweek featuring the homosexual serial killer, Jeffrey Dahmer, on the cover. At the other end of the bed are copies of Jet magazine, the kind of magazine a ‘normal’ American teenage boy might read. The trundle-bed served as a metaphor for growing up gay in an Afro-American middle-class family, and the teenager’s desire to conceal his sexual identity from a judgmental society. It evokes not only his fear of being ‘found out’ but also the dangers that arise when sexual desires cannot be openly acknowledged: Jeffrey Dahmer
murdered (often after raping) seventeen men and boys between 1978 and 1991 and, in 1993, the film Jeffery Dahmer: The Secret Life, was released.The bed has also been used as a metaphor for the modern homelessness crisis. By the 1980s around 20,000 people in London were living in accommodation for homeless people, with about 1,000 living on the streets. Recent cut-backs in benefits prevented 16 and 17 year-olds from claiming housing benefit and, since they could not pay the rent if they ran away from home, there was little alternative but to sleep ‘rough’. The closure of many of the old, crowded dormitories for homeless people, and their replacement with single-room hostels, meant that while housing standards rose, the number of beds available fell. Corresponding increases in the numbers of people with drink, drug and mental health problems exacerbated the problem. Homelessness was, and continues to be, a serious global issue.
[IMAGE 179: Perry Bard, Here Lies, 1989-1900, artist’s private collection]
Out on the street the homeless sleeper has resorted to inventive methods to create makeshift beds ranging from sleeping bags and pavement gratings to benches and cardboard shelters. In the studio a number of artists in the 1980s and 1990s recreated beds for the homeless in order to highlight their plight. Amongst them was photographer Perry Bard. In Here Lies (1989) Bard constructed a bed and/or grave made of cinder blocks, urban rubble, glass and a mirror resembling a coffin more than a bed – a reminder of the premature fate of many homeless people - and to ‘address the tension – between cardboard and concrete. Comfort and torture. Rich and poor. Art and Life’. Slides of temporary shelters photographed by Bard over a three-year period were projected onto the glass pillow. In December 2007 the conceptual artist Mark Wallinger, otherwise known as the Dancing Bear (he once made a film of himself wandering around a deserted German gallery disguised as a bear), won the £25,000 Turner Prize for State Britain, a 40-metre-long replica of a homeless ‘bed’ constructed by Iraq War protestor Brian Haw in 2001. Haw had set up a mini-peace camp opposite the Houses of Parliament consisting of a tarpaulin shelter in which he slept, complete with anti-war banners, placards, tea-making area, flags, photographs and posters. When, in May 2006, police were granted new powers banning protests within one kilometre of the Palace of Westminster, the site was demolished.
[IMAGE 180: Mark Wallinger, State Britain, 2008]
Like Bard and Wallinger, for Tracey Emin, born in 1963 on the outskirts of London, the bed can reflect the tensions that exist between art and life. Emin’s father, an ethnic Turkish Cypriot, ran a hotel in Margate but when the business folded, Emin and her mother suffered a severe decline in their standard of living. At the age of 13, Emin was raped or, as the artist herself describes it, ‘broken in’. Emin studied fashion at Medway College of Design, before going on to study printing at Maidstone Art College in 1984 and stayed in a relationship with expelled Medway student, confessional poet Billy Childish until 1987. She then moved to London to study at the Royal College of Art where she obtained an MA in painting. In 1993 Emin opened The Shop with fellow artist Sarah Lucas in Bethnal Green selling T-shirts and ashtrays with Damien Hirst’s picture stuck to the bottom. While looking after the shop, Emin approached contemporary art dealers including Jay Jopling asking them to invest £20 in her as an artist. Jopling was impressed by her work and organized her first one-man show at his newly-opened White Cube gallery in 1994. The exhibition featured many personal objects such as photographs and cigarette packets belonging to Emin’s past, and this willingness to exhibit items of a private nature soon became the artist’s trademark. At Minky Manky, her show at the South London Gallery in 1995, Emin installed an enormous blue tent appliquéd with different people’s names in big colourful letters. Entitled Everyone I Have Ever Slept With, it included sexual partners, two aborted children, and relatives she had shared a bed with as a child.
[IMAGE 181: Tracey Emin]
In 1998 Emin was shortlisted for the Turner Prize for My Bed, an instillation consisting of an unmade doubled bed. In itself, this was not what made her work original. Artists and writers had previously exploited the theme of the unmade bed, primarily as a sign of recent sexual. In the late-nineteenth-century novel Germinal, Emile Zola used ‘crumpled linen…coverlets thrown back and the crumpled sheets’ to describe a post-coital, adulterous scene: ‘the heat and smell of fornication after a whole night of orgies’, while in Aegina visited by Jupiter (1767-69), Jean-Baptiste Greuze depicted a dishevelled bed to add to the erotic nature of the painting. You can almost reach out and touch the bed and its soft, sensuous linen, which seems to assume a sexually-charged life of its own. What was completely revolutionary about My Bed, however, was that it was an autobiographical, confessional, highly personal work revealing all the intimate details of the artist’s life, most of which are in no way romantic or beautiful, but on the contrary sordid and unsettling. While a double bed base supporting a mattress lay covered in two dented pillows, crumpled bed-sheets stained yellow with body secretions, panty-hose and a towel, on the floor surrounding it were a number of personal items such as used condoms, a pair of knickers stained with blood, and other detritus including an empty vodka bottle, cigarette packs, and a pair of well-worn slippers. When the exhibit was shown elsewhere, including Japan, a hangman’s noose hung over the bed. Emin claimed that she was presenting the bed as it was when she had stayed in it for several days during a bout of suicidal depression brought on by relationship difficulties.
My Bed, and her later work Dark Bed, were used by the artist as a vehicle for expressing the darker aspects of her troubled life and the impact this has had on her emotions, the kinds of things, she says, most people would be too ashamed to reveal. The rape, abortions, depression, alcohol dependency, relationship and sexual difficulties are all there, accompanied by objects which reveal the owner’s fear, vulnerability, insecurity, self-neglect, and self-obsession. In christening her 1990 work My Bed rather than just Bed, Emin is openly driven by an unshakeable faith in the importance of the personal in art and the artist’s right to declaim it. Through the medium of her bed, she has ‘turned her life into a public spectacle like no other artist before her’+ - and earned £150,000 in the process.
Emin’s bed is part of today’s Big Brother culture which, egged on by the media, pursues its relentless intrusion into what used to be regarded as ‘private’ territory – especially where celebrities are concerned. In 2003 the Trustees of London’s National Portrait Gallery commissioned photographer Sam Taylor-Wood to film British footballing legend David Beckham. Attempting to produce a visual record of the famous left-footer in an off-guarded moment at his most vulnerable, and presumably to court maximum press attention, Taylor-Wood decided to photograph Beckham in bed. Mrs Jay Jopling and the superstar booked themselves into a hotel room in Madrid (Beckham had moved to Spain to play for Real Madrid). Wearing diamond earrings, a necklace, a bracelet, and not much else, he apparently fell asleep quite quickly and the result – a 67-minute video portrait of a horizontal David Beckham – was unveiled at the gallery in April 2004. Christening the portrait David after Michelangelo’s masterpiece, Taylor-Wood confessed that she had exploited the bed to create a feeling of closeness, and set up the angle of the camera so that the viewer feels he or she is lying next to the footballer ‘in that entirely intimate way that lovers do after sex’.*
In the list of those who have used the bed for self-publicity and self-expression, pop singer Madonna must rank amongst the most controversial. While touring with Blond Ambition in 1990 she was threatened with police arrest in Toronto for indecent behaviour and condemned by the Catholic Church in Rome for combining sex with religion. Dressed in a John Galliano basque with conical breasts and blond Marilyn Monroe-style platinum curls, the singer mimed Like A Virgin while writhing about on a red velvet bed. She lay surrounded by hermaphrodite male slaves who acted out sexual positions with her. When the dancers left the stage, Madonna was left alone in a masturbatory frenzy. The ‘immoral live performance’ was captured in the singer’s documentary film of the tour, In Bed with Madonna.
[IMAGE 182: In Bed With Madonna, 1990]
In 2006 a survey was conducted into British bed habits by Silentnight, the UK's leading bed manufacturer, reputed to provide one out of every four beds sold. The research revealed that the average Brit spends over two hours a night lying in bed not sleeping. Out of 570 hours a year that we spend in bed awake, 211 are spent thinking, 153 having sex, 95 watching TV, 84 reading, 59 working, 22 reaching important decisions, 43 talking to partners, 39 eating and 7 exercising. Dr David Holmes, a social psychologist at Manchester Metropolitan University, is not surprised at the findings of the survey. Given the frantic pace of twenty-first-century life, he believes that the bed could gradually be taking over from the lounge in providing a peaceful, comfortable forum for occupations normally associated with living or sitting rooms. Holmes also sees the bed developing as an office; in the future he envisages ‘less intimidating and tiring versions of meetings. Horizontal meetings with ceiling projectors could even give birth to lateral conferencing, where comfort and clandestine snoozes may improve attendance and stamina’.* Holmes’s predictions may not be completely far-fetched: in 2005 the Times reported that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was working on a future Multimedia bed. While lying down, the sleeper looks up at a ceiling that is actually a large computer screen which can show emails and the morning news as well as play music.
[IMAGE 183: The Histoire Do Be Swivel Bed. A rotating swivel bed run by remote control from Mobelform, with built-in cabinetry, TV stand and orthopedic mattress]
The mind-blowing technological innovations of recent years have arguably played a major part in influencing what we now get up to in bed and how long we spend doing it. The fact that the television has taken up permanent occupancy in the bedroom is hugely significant. Over 58% of Americans go to sleep watching TV. For Italians, it may even have taken over from sex as being ‘the poor man’s opera’. In 2006 a study by a sexologist found that Italian couples who had a television in their bedroom had sex half as often as those who didn’t. Serenella Salomoni, whose team of psychologists questioned 523 couples, concluded: ‘If there’s no television in the bedroom, the frequency [of sexual intercourse] doubles’.
The modern obsession with email and other modern gadgetry has had an enormous impact on bed sex. In July 2007 15% of Americans described themselves as being addicted to email, while 83% admitted they checked their email at least once while on vacation. Mike Lazaridis, the inventor of the wireless gadget known as the BlackBerry (sometimes referred to as ‘crackberry’ because of its addictive qualities) has made a fortune out of his creation. Few parts of the world are immune; some of the company’s fastest growing markets include India, Saudi Arabia and Indonesia. Many BlackBerry users including EasyJet intrepreneur Stelios Haji-Ioannou and artist Tracey Emin confess to taking their handset to bed with them. Edward Hallowell, an American psychologist was asked by a patient whether he thought ‘it was abnormal that her husband brings the BlackBerry to bed and lays it next to them while they make love’. Hallowell replied by saying that ‘abnormal’ is not necessarily the same thing as ‘uncommon’.
If men are not fiddling with their BlackBerries in bed, they may be playing with other gadgets. In 2003 the British consumer electronics magazine Stuff reported that out of 952 people surveyed, 33% admitted to having more fun in bed with their games console, computer or iPod than with their wife or partner. The magazine’s publishing manager commented: ‘Our research reveals many men put gadgets at the heart of their lives and often put their wives or girlfriends second’.
Bed designers have not been slow to respond to changing nocturnal habits and an increasing consumer demand for gadgetry. Ron Arud, a British furniture designer for hotels with an architect’s training, was one of the first to appreciate the marketability of an in-built TV. In 2001 he came up with an enormous circular bed dominated by a floor-to-ceiling television screen. Within just four years the quantity and quality of high-tech beds mushroomed. The RUF-Cinema Bed was released onto the market in 2005. Complete with an integrated cinema rack fitted between the two upholstered headboard bolsters, with enough space for a five-disc DVD/CD player and game consoles, the bed featured a large screen which appeared and disappeared into the bed’s footboard at the touch of a button. An integrated five-speaker surround-sound system and a subwoofer underneath transformed the bed into a private movie house. To enable the occupant to connect to the Internet at all times, many contemporary beds feature in-built modems, iPod docking stations, hidden cabling and power sockets. For those who intend to use their bed as a private study, there are beds with side-tables, storage pockets, reading lamps and magazine baskets.
Of the 6 million beds sold every year in Britain, one in seven is adjustable. In 2005 Shane Harding, the marketing director of Dunlopillo (the company responsible for introducing latex foam mattresses in the late 1920s), said:
Design and technical innovation have ensured that adjustable beds have come a long way from the days when they were seen as something that only the frail or elderly would buy. The days of trying to get comfortable while reading a book in bed have been left far behind, and the mountain of pillows for watching late-night TV has been swapped for a button
The vision of a twenty-first-century man in a spacious, comfortable bed working or pursuing a number of diversions recalls the practices of his ancestors who treated their beds in a similar fashion. We may be surrounded by high-tech gadgetry and supported by space-age mattresses, but in essence we are imitating the age-old custom of making the bed the centre of our world. Milton dictated the majority of Paradise Lost in bed. Proust pended much of Temps Perdu there too. In June 1911, best-selling novelist Elinor Glynn, whose ‘squalid’ books were not allowed to be mentioned in Edward VII’s presence, tucked herself up in her Louis XVI bed and, living on sandwiches and brandy, produced her next hit, The Reason Why, in just eighteen days. The editor of the Daily Express had agreed to discharge her profligate husband’s debts if she came up with a ninety-thousand-word book for serialisation that summer. Pepys plucked his lute in his bedchamber; he read and sang there with his wife Elizabeth; he even did his accounts in bed. While holed up in the underground cabinet war rooms in Whitehall, Winston Churchill dictated many of his Second World War speeches while lying in his small camp-bed sipping whisky, an image evoked by Evelyn Waugh in Officers and Gentlemen: ‘That very morning in a deep bed in a deep shelter a buoyant busy personage had lain, apportioning the day’s work of an embattled Empire in a series of minutes…from the same heap of pillows the ukase went out’.
It is difficult to predict what technological advancements are in store for the bed in the centuries to come. For some time astronauts in the gravity-free cosmos have dispensed with beds, choosing instead to sleep in their seats, in sleeping bags attached to the walls of the shuttle, or by tethering themselves to the walls. In a satirical, futuristic piece written by Michael Crick the ‘Microsoft Standard Bed’ (MSB), equipped with robotic legs, will become recognised in 2030 as an intelligent being in its own right. In 2052, we read, people will be running their whole lives from their beds, only climbing out about once a week. By 2063, Crick writes, the MSB will replace humans ‘as the dominant life form in the universe.* While it may be hard to envisage such a future for the bed, as well as for us, it is probably true that in today’s world: ‘One of the most adventurous things left us is to go to bed. For no one can lay a hand on our dreams’. +
[IMAGE 184: Sam Taylor-Wood, David Beckham. 2004]
* Palmer K T, Walsh K, Bendall H, Cooper C & Coggon D, Back Pain in Britain, British Medical Journal, 2000
* Nina Felshin, The Embedded Metaphor, 1996
+ Patrick Elliott, curator of Tracey Emin: 20 Years, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, August 2008
* Waldemar Januszcak, O, Come Let Us Adore Him, taken from Culture, The Sunday Times, 25 April 2004
* lifestyleextra.com, More time spent in bed thinking than having sex, 14 July 2006
* http://www.beds-uk.org.uk/futureofbeds.asp
+
Edward Verrall Lucas, 365 Days and One More , 1926
