‘Sketch to Product’ blog
I have written a guest post for the V&A’s ‘Sketch to Product’ blog called ‘Playing God: architects and railway models. Please follow the link.
Digital aid
To help visitors to the Afghanistan exhibition at the British Museum visualise the architecture of the ancient town of Ai Khanoum, a digital representation of ‘how it would have been’ is sandwiched between various hulks of stone and information placards. This eastern outpost of Alexander the Great’s vast empire, built in 4th century BC, is rendered immaculately.
The surfaces of the digitalised columns and facades have a perfectly weathered look, like the recently cleaned Exhibition Road facade of the Victoria and Albert Museum. Eyes, more used to passive televisual spectatorship than staring at an inert object, slide on to the smoothness of the image.
In perhaps the most faddish scene of the reconstruction, ghostly, watery and transparent outlines of human forms walk through the space without obscuring the view of the architecture. The priority is to show off the accuracy of archeological research, it would seem, the contours of the human body erased as much as possible. Barely visible, these humans are projections of orderly activity; behaving themselves, much like the optimistic, cool and happy images of people you see in digitalised projections of multi-use leisure, retail and office complexes.
A model of the past, an indication as to the expected movements of people. But Ai Khanoum is dusty too, just look.
Amateur politicians
Andrew Neil’s programme ‘Posh and Posher’ shown on BBC two on Wednesday 26th January was sure to attract the attention of many television critics – the idea that politics is a closed shop for only those that went to Eton and Oxbridge is pretty topical with Cameron and Clegg on the top of the political ladder. They all coalesce around the idea that Andrew Neil asked good questions as the Guardian put it, but did not give any answers (Guardian, Independent, Mail).
The most poignant issue that the programme raised was not about posh and posher: this was the catchy title that went together well with the stock images of top hats, affluent looking boys and wonderfully old schools, all objects of desire that are symbols of luxury and privilege. A better title, although a little awkward, would have been ‘professional and professionaler’.
The worry is not that more and more politicians come from Oxford, Cambridge, and Eton and Westminster before them but that we are witnessing a professionalisation of politics. This means that the Politics Philosophy and Ethics course in Oxbridge is a rubber stamp of approval, like a Dentistry qualification for a dentist, assuring progression to the next stage. Then you become a SPAD (special advisor) to a prominent minister in Westminster and then you are put on some shortlist to be an MP in some area you have no prior knowledge of.
If the idea of democracy is to represent then it would be good for parties to field more local candidates on election shortlists, and for the political system to make it easier for independent candidates to stand without towing a party’s line.
The call is for amateur politicians, those who know little about the Westminster village but a lot about the area they represent having perhaps been brought up there, or having lived there for a few years, or even worked there – basically a more solid connection than Tristam Hunt with Stoke-on-Trent Central. This might add a little spice to the proceedings at Westminster, like politicians who came through the Unions (although bumbling, John Prescott made politics more interesting).
It is difficult to foresee a revival in postmen becoming politicians through the Unions (like Alan Johnson), as they themselves have become increasingly professionalised, mirroring the wider phenomenon. But perhaps a liberalisation of politics is needed where a lawyer, journalist, CEO, nurse, postman, can spend their free time involved in politics to a degree more in-depth than watching Newnight and listening to the Today programme. It already happens in the political system – local councillors – but maybe we should see this local system translated to the national. Otherwise it will be the continuation of smart guys more interested in metropolitan power than representing people.
Ordered creativity
Entering a Hobbycraft store you return to a former state of childhood: a kid in candy store. There is so much stuff – beads, wool, transfers, small packets of cut mirrors, blank masks, embroidery kits, paint-by-numbers, colourful stickers, mounts, pins, pegs – a vast conglomeration of craft goods. Heaven for children and hobby-inclined adults who are enticed to think about the next craft they could take up.
The imagination roves about, over half completed model train sets, that card that you made for your mother for Christmas last year, that watercolour set still waiting of the top shelf of the garage for that month-long bout of art tourism you were planning and the hen party you went to where the chief bridesmaid used glitter glue on embarrassment-inducing t-shirts.
In the store these imaginations, and many more are stimulated. ‘What can I make from this’ when you pass your eyes over some length of cloth or an outrageously coloured beads.
All this is organised in long, supermarket-straight aisles. The products are stocked according to a grid pattern, with a metallic pegboard giving the regimented structure as well as an ability to modify the retail display if the stocks and quantities change.
Each packet invites creativity, each bead has a different destination, but here in Hobbycraft they fit to the grid. Visually similar to modernist abstraction, the aisle layout at Hobbycraft is also plural. Creativity, a label everyone desires to have attached to their own personal branding, is shown commodified in Hobbycraft, with such striking splendour. You have to walk down each aisle so as to not miss that wonderful packet of something, that kit or material. And of course, this leaves you spending at least £10 a trip…
Thanks to Charlie Evatt for the idea of writing this blog.
Gau-gone
What was important to Gauguin? In the intervening corridor between room one and two of the Tate Modern’s blockbuster show, we get an good idea: distance from the artistic centre and distraction. Another quote on the wall, taken from a letter to his wife Mette from Tahiti in 1892, grasps this feeling:
‘What do husbands do, especially stockbrokers? On Sundays they either go to the races, or to the cafe, or with whores, for men need a few distractions otherwise they cannot work and besides, it is only human nature.’
Gauguin had a need to get away all the time; he needed distraction. Firstly from the industry of stockbroking that he left to become a painter after a stock-market crash. Then he wanted to be distant from the artistic centre of Paris that, throughout the 1870s and 1880s, had given him contact with older artists and patrons, including Pissarro, Schuffenecker and ceramicist Ernst Chaplet. His biography reminds you of that guy at the office who always collates his holiday time into one lump and then leaves for two months for a trek, expedition, or some grueling ‘return to nature’.
And like that guy in the office you are clearly impressed with what is ‘brought back’: Gauguin’s paintings from Tahiti have long attracted praise and are situated as the prologue to Western modernism and abstraction. The reviews of many major papers pay lip service to this standard story of art history (Telegraph, Guardian). But what about Gauguin’s perceptive comment above, that mini distractions every Sunday are essential to ‘human nature’, those marginal activities… Indeed, like spending Sunday afternoon in the Tate Modern.
This aspect of Gauguin’s career, when his distraction was Sunday painting, deserves more attention. The separated two blue-painted ‘context’ rooms in the show did not allow for the cross-fertilisation of biography, development of technique and social context that would give the paintings an even greater resonance. The brilliant paintings are shown for their own worth and as an audience our expectations of Gauguin as a master are left unperturbed; we just learn that he can tell myths too. I thought all artists did that.
What’s missing is an account of his time as an amateur and then as the rather errant father of various styles (broadly summarized by a celebration of flat planes of colour – cloisonnism). It is the glamourous trip to the exotic that we all remember, not his unconventional techniques and attitudes born out of his self-taught status. This is most powerfully shown by his incessant use of all sorts of media outside of oil painting throughout the 1880s – ceramics, woodblocks, fan painting, wood carving and sculpture – all undertaken with a certain abandon that was not like the naivety he was claiming to represent (as some bourgeois ‘Indian’), but more a fearless effort to prove himself as an artist. Everything he does, from doodling in clay, to his own multiple self-representations has the touch of the artist about it. In his determined effort to be the artist Gauguin pretty much opens up a vast range of materials for artists to exert their power over, away from oil painting. The Nabis, a group of avant-garde French artists in the 1890s follow in his wake extending their ‘art’ to stain glass windows, pottery, screen and fan decoration, sculpture, and woodblock printing. This openness is shown by his willingness to use looser canvases in his Tahitian work. Without the tightly pressed canvases of Parisian art supply firms he needed to just use what was to hand, in the spirit of a bricoleur in which he was well versed.
Another gaping absence in the show is a dose of classic postcolonial theory… What was the intention behind Gauguin’s othering? What happens when he shifts from painting Breton women to his depictions from further field. Is this a case of one’s private paradise being discovered by rivals, or worse the swathe of bourgeois tourists with train passes, that pushes Gauguin further abroad? Is Gauguin haunted by the same desires to avoid conformity, like Richard (Leonardo di Caprio) in Alex Garland’s The Beach? Gauguin celebrates the other, but he is late – a 100 years before, the islands he visited were colonised. Even when he was the furthest away from the Parisian art scene he couldn’t escape civilization and was reduced on the Easter Islands to provoking his Catholic priest neighbour by calling his hut the house of pleasure, with its flow of female visitors.
Gauguin’s exoticism certainly might leave the strongest imprint in the mind, but his flightiness off to the South Seas shows how he took the difficult ‘easy way out’. In other words, despite the physical difficulty, illness and discomfort of traveling thousands of miles, Gauguin’s ‘outsider-ness’ was secured – he could be categorised easily (and after his death, sold, with great success). His position as the man on the margins within France demands greater attention, the ‘insider’ within a culture unsure of itself, unsure of what art is; questions that he addressed better when he was closer to it.
Sue Perkins and Giles Coren… live
The opening chatty introduction to the BBC’s newest historico-documentary Giles and Sue live The Good Life gave Sue Perkins the opportunity to sum up the motivation of the original self-sufficiency couple, Tom and Barbara in The Good Life:
‘[They] genuinely were doing it because they wanted to make a difference and change their lives, whereas now its seen as the latest cool thing. It was a private jet to Venice to dine at Harry’s, now the upper middle class accoutrement is an eglu and a couple of manky chickens’
Sue’s recognition of self-sufficiency as a middle class aesthetic obsession seems at first to be perceptive. Today, self-sufficiency is mostly manifest as a fashion, a niche in the huge market of eco-consumption, and even in the 1970s (when the Good Life first aired) very few individuals were actually able to sustain complete self-sufficiency, due to its expense, impracticality and insufficient knowledge. Keeping chickens in suburbia is very much like pursuing a hobby, it relies on free time and depends upon the money generated from some kind of employment.
However, in the scene immediately after Sue capitulates to her own criticism when she walks into a suburban home, which will be the base for Giles and Sue’s reenactment of the Good Life. Dressed in loose dungarees she gawks at the interior and explains how the decor is completely in keeping with Tom and Barbara ‘style’, saying the ‘palette is familiar’. Instead of challenging the current fashion for all things green, Giles and Sue simply amplify self-sufficiency as a style and nothing else, despite their earlier lament that the upper middle classes only keep chickens for show.
This was no genuine reenactment of The Good Life, and the duo accepted this in a quick comment during the introduction – they admit they were not going to live the good life 24/7. Also Giles Coren in his appearance on Radio 4′s midweek on 8th November 2010, admitted that when the pig did a mess on the lounge floor there was someone else to clean it up ‘as it was tv’. Coren on the radio show also admitted to ‘hamming it up’ explaining how everything was set up, a simulation of The Good Life in which Giles and Sue were just placed.
Of course all television is staged, it is all a charade for entertainment. But whereas the original sitcom was a well-scripted, well-acted parody of middle class behavior explored through a couple’s eccentric decision to be self-sufficient, the reality television remake was seduced by taking the mick out of the idea of self-sufficiency with Sue and Giles as our willingly incompetent and foolhardy guides. You end up believing that Giles and Sue did very little apart from pose for the camera, as Guardian writer Phil Hogan has suggested. The example when Giles attempted to cultivate the lawn is a good example: he comically fires up the old equipment and cannot control it, only for the next scene to show Giles contentedly planting his first vegetables in a perfectly plowed patch. The programme is trapped by nostalgia, trying to copy what The Good Life without any insight into what self-sufficiency must have been like. Also, Giles and Sue are not good actors.
Self-sufficiency is an attempt to negotiate a place in the modern world where you adopt alternative habits of production and consumption, rather than an outright rejection of all things modern. Giles and Sue do not contribute to an understanding of self-sufficiency when they bring in experts in various fields of agriculture (all reductive stereotypes – the heavily sideburned poultryman, the headmistress-like breadmaker) and prance about like children in a GCSE acting class. They do not explore the differences between self-sufficiency as a fashion and self-sufficiency as a fragmented movement on the fringes of modern society in all its rich complexity.
Sue and Giles idolise self-sufficiency as a more ‘authentic’ life but then serve just to make it a stylistic issue, a fashion, with the ‘behind the scenes’ labour inherent to television hidden from view.
Free thinking on Radio 3: Kevin McCloud
Philip Dodd asked Kevin McCloud whether he considered his lecture on the value of craftsmanship, delivered as a part of Radio 3′s ‘Free Thinking Festival‘ at the Sage, Gateshead , an ‘elegy for a world that’s passed’. McCloud answered that his sense of loss was more specifically directed towards modern day misunderstanding of how objects are made and ignorance of the social contexts of something’s production. This answer and his whole lecture was a defense of establishing an affective relationship between man and the objects, affective insofar as we need to judge an object’s worth on the key attributes of tactility, narrative (its social meaning), patina and authenticity.
However McCloud’s answer to Dodd’s question demonstrated his overly simplistic condemnation of modern mass production and moral haughtiness that marked the whole lecture. He explained his involvement designing taps and toilet roll holders with the Birmingham-based firm Samuel Heath, praising the firm for drawing on local labour, using local materials, local expertise to make objects of high quality that were ‘beautifully made’, encouraging consumer awareness through explaining the processes of production on the packaging of the product.
Given that McCloud was advocating consumer restraint and buying only things that was necessary throughout his morally charged lecture, one questions why McCloud helped design an object that is entirely superfluous in the first place (you can just put toilet roll on the floor of one’s bathroom and use a soap instead of a liquid soap dispenser). But then it reveals McCloud’s preference for a fiction of denial of modern mass production, rather than a genuine critical engagement with what he claims to be talking about: craftsmanship.
He claims that the meaning of an object is better if we know the craftsman who made it, better still if we met them. Thus he celebrates, ‘free range bananas’ (whatever they are) and fair trade coffee and all that information on supermarket packaging that provide us with endless information about an objects production. Dodd, the chair, rightly describes this information as fiction and the consumer has long been smart enough to question the veracity of the moral value of things like fair trade coffee (see link). Yet McCloud fails to see past the fiction of his own story in his call for ethically motivated consumerism, a story long perpetuated by the thinkers that he quotes – John Stuart Mill, St Augustine, Richard Sennett and John Ruskin.
This is the fiction that helps sustain a moral heirarchy for those with the time, social position and intellectual tools to espouse an ideology based on restraint, prudence and the pursuit of less. ‘A connection through objects to the processes and resources that go into making them’ that McCloud urges, is expensive, like the taps that he designs, like organic food and bespoke furniture. Consumers are wise to this. We can even suggest that consumers read the narrative of ethically responsible consumption and knowingly reject it either because they can not afford the price tag, or because they suspect its truthfulness.
And it is clear to see why, as McCloud’s argument represents a modern manifestation of Hardy’s idea that ‘the poor prefer luxury over culture’ (as Dodd mentioned). McCloud is not as blunt to say that the poor have ‘low’ taste, but he highlights that time – time to prepare for a social experience and then absorb and reflect upon it – is vital for an authentic appreciation of something, be it a social meeting, a conversation or purchasing a new desk. Access to this time is not free to all, but dependent on social and economic circumstance. Not all have the access or will to deploy time in reflecting or ‘preparing’.
Critics of modern society, like McCloud, are so alarmed with the conditions of mass production that they cannot but help adopt a moralistic stance that is didactic. Like a nineteenth century headmaster who thinks all children are inherently mischievous and aims to iron out their problems through their own guidance, McCloud sets out to instruct an unruly mob of consumers whose compulsion to shop matches the addiction of a drug addict. Instead of realising the complexity of consumer experience he assumes all consumers are being duped into a message of acquisition for its own sake. It is a reductive attitude that marks a failure to cope with the fact that the rise of consumerism has given unprecedented levels of individual choice and critical reflection. Unfortunately craft has become the unfortunate linchpin on which affluent middle classes can base their consumerism on. Knowing how the thing was made becomes a new means of re-enforcing a discriminating strand of middle-class social and cultural assumptions.
Backed up by the apocalyptic expectation of sea levels rising and climate obliteration, McCloud’s argument seems relevant: to save the planet we need to be more ethical in our consumption. But to be truly ethical is to challenge the comfort of middle class ethical consumption and reflect the reality of global connectedness. In other words we need to see how the anonymous ‘Made in China’ tag is more authentic in an age of global capitalism than the pot made by the craftsman up the road.
I would prefer to ‘shop myself into oblivion’ (McCloud’s apocalyptic warning) than believe in pre-existing models of taste based on bourgeoise responsibility, prudence, and veneration of an ‘impossible-to-attain’ authentic relationship between man and objects. Better revel in the inauthenticity and superfluousness of capitalist production. Better to praise shopping as a reasonable way of negotiating human frailties.
Pedestrian face-off
One of the most mundane actions of everyday life is walking down a street. Where you come from and where you are going are irrelevant, just the fact that you intend to get somewhere. Yet this most unimportant of experiences that passes by without conscious thought can be transformed into a situation of great emotional turmoil, embarrassment and despair.
The pedestrian face-off (a.k.a. playing chicken with other pedestrians, streetwalking clumsiness) describes that situation when you and a fellow pedestrian walking in the opposite direction are unable to get out of each other’s way, regardless of the width of pavement, the physical dexterity of either of the subjects, or the pace of either person’s walk. No matter how well thought through a strategy to avoid the oncoming barrier, once you are in a pedestrian face-off you are locked and will no doubt ultimately end up uncomfortably close to a complete stranger’s face muttering an awkward apology.
Embarrassment and near physical contact with a stranger not something people want to dwell on, it is no surprise that strategies of dealing with pedestrian face-offs are not a common dinner party conversation. Yet Sigmund Freud bucks this trend:
‘I have also told myself that the annoying and clumsy attempt to avoid someone else on the street, when you step to one side or another for several seconds but always end up on the same side, until you are both left facing each other and ‘barring the way’, duplicates some form of provocative conduct, pursuing sexual relations in the guise of clumsiness.’
Freud S, The psychopathology of everyday life Bell A trans. Penguin: London (2002), 168.
Freud deserves credit for even committing this experience to paper but his theory about pursuit of sexual intentions would worry all of us out there who end up facing elder members of our community with strong coffee breath. The example of adolescent male teenagers blocking off school corridors from their female peers could be used to defend Freud’s position, but then most things pubescent males do has the guise of clumsiness.
My last pedestrian face-off had none of these qualities, and I am certain that the vast majority of these unfortunate situations are the result of two people that are desperately trying to avoid even the slightest of contact, but end up failing, probably because they are trying to hard.
Pavement 17: Blemish
In the early spring of 2010 the town centre regeneration of Stoke Newington’s Church street finally came to an end (see previous post for details). Residents were delighted with the new smoothness on the street, and doctors were overwhelmed by the decline in ankle injuries sustained by their patients living within the N16 post-code. My accounts focused on how perambulators, wheeled suitcases, cars and lorries all benefitted from the smoothness, but having recently acquired a bike I can vouch for the extra speed that is generated from cycling on two wheels over this tarmac too.
But, only eight months after the last dirty track marks left by the highway maintenance trucks has faded, the sound of a pneumatic drill once again welcomed Church Street residents last week. Proprietors of restaurants quivered in their boots, recalling the experience when the pavement in front of their businesses was torn up. Reassuringly, looking out of the window to find the source of the noise didn’t agitate the bile of fear of a prolonged disturbance to the leafy calm of the street. It was just a Virgin man cutting a small hole in the road.
The noise lasted about 10 minutes. It was loud, but the engineers just needed to put a cable into the road, maybe its fibre optics just like they advertise on television with cherished cartoon characters of yore. The arrows outline the green square and underneath this square was a metal grill. In terms of road maintenance this was mere surface cosmetics. They responsibly cordoned off their work and didn’t leave much mess, but their re-patching job left much to be desired.
When the pneumatic drill first dug in to the road it was the first direct cut into the surface that the road had been subjected to since the renovation. I was pleased when they did not go too deep, or cover too wide a surface area.
The road will be subject to much maintenance over the decades ahead, but you might expect that such a nicely surfaced street would receive a little respect from the workers with their pneumatic power machinery. If this was a fine blazer or winter coat, would you repair it with such a messy patch. No squared edges or any attempt at finding a level, just a splodge that looks like a spilt coffee, or a stain from someone’s Friday night excesses. Worse still, cigarette buts, leaves and street debris collect on its sticky absorbent surface. The arrows’ previous function of guiding the engineers work, now accentuates the mark left behind.
The road will, of course, sustain the hammers and blows of many improvements in the future, but if all of them left such a blemish the road would soon be as bumpy as a off-road motorbike track.
An ode to the 149 bendy bus
You were always bendy for me,
with the webbed middle,
making every corner a fairground ride.
And allowing free access. Bus conductors infrequently supervised your route,
making the penniless feel comfortable.
And shouting, vomit and lunacy among your clientele
never deterred me from boarding,
But then I didn’t have a choice…
I bet you felt great with all those cool destinations
Shoreditch, Dalston, Stoke Newington,
But you took the flack,
Your floors were sodden with London’s liquids
Your interior fittings loosened by the jarring roads
Chewing gum was stuffed into your upholstery, Yet this blended with the cacophonous patterns
You didn’t mind
The reliable bendy
And now with the return of the double decker, No free ride Meagre comfort on the slim upholstery and plastic hard-edged surfaces And new yellow handrail poles glaring London’s abstraction The bendy might well have baffled with large turning circles And annoyed traffic with its ungainliness But it was speedy and communal With those four seater booths Knocking knees against another Straining to retain personal space Your short spongey life will not be remembered And they will say the 149 has always been double decker
