futureproofing stones
September 17, 2008
Perhaps unsurprisingly, neither Louise Minchin nor Colin Jackson is a natural TV presenter. One’s a former hurdler, and the other is apparently a radio presenter. Shunt them in front of a camera, as it appears increasingly habitual for the BBC to do, and they’ll grin at each other until the glaring intrusion of the lens becomes unbearable and digging their finger nails into their palms no longer relieves the tension and they must at last speak. To each other simultaneously, naturally. Then it gets even worse. It’s as though the viewer is privy to some nightmarish arranged wedding and the camera is a priest who the couple must be polite to, and simper social embrassment at, whilst cloying to be free of his presence so they can crack open the Keighley mini bar and get on with their joyless wedding night.
The other day I saw them presenting Sunday Live - or Sunday Life, I can’t recall what it’s called, I’d guess it’s the former because of the surfeit of dead-air/forced-grin time. Whatever it’s called they had on it had a story about a guy who’d home-videoed his family every day for the past 30 years. He’d got a cine camera in 1978 and had moved onto a VHS camcorder in the eighties, and then through to a digital one now. They showed some bits of his films while Jackson gayed it up with his Golden Retriever-enthusiastic commentary. As well as recording all weddings, birthdays and Christmases, the guy had - as one would inevitably have to if everything had to be filmed - trips to the shop, meals, evenings playing board games, and other dramatic everyday moments, like sunbathing and watching TV.
Currently the guy was engaged with transferring his archive from VHS - which is magnetic degradation prone - to DVD - which is apparently ‘indestructible’ - one can only imagine the hours of enjoyment the future desert-adapted species of beings are going to have when one realises that in millions of years the only thing that’ll remain from the Anthropocene is boxsets of Lovejoy and Bergerac. Ah, only then will the true nostalgia of antiques, classic cars, and drama from the eighties apogee of TV really matter. But I digress. As well as the Sisyphean project of transferring the past to the medium of the future, the guy also has to make sure he films every day’s events. He is endlessly engaged with the peculiar obsession of futureproofing (as I note the curiously modern term now is) both the past and the present simlutaneously. By futureproofing the media, of course, what he’s really up to is futureproofing himself; giving himself the best chance of living on when he dies. Then there’ll be an almost real-time record of his life. And since it is nearly real-time, should anyone want to watch it then they’d have to give over their own life to watch his. Which is almost what he’s doing himself, because he spends so much time protecting the past from the fututre that there is no present. It’s a baffling conceit. I love it. And it allows me, for the umpteenth time, to reference the scene in Back to the Future where Michael J. Fox is in the past and looks at a photo of himself in the future and sees the effect his curerent actions are having on the future by whether he is represented in the image or not.
The guy’s life is like one prolonged legacy tour, where he permanently clamps a camera to his eye to make film to corroborate his own image to the self that he can’t otherwise engage with or recognise. It reminds me of Martin Parr’s photograph of the tourist on horseback with a camcorder pressed to his eye whilst being led through sights by a disinterested local. Much of the set of photos that one comes from (Small World) lays open to ridicule the curiously tyrannical stupidity of the tourist process - where people aeroplane around the world with a compact camera recreating scenes from tourist brochures; photographing the Leaning Tower of Pisa, or Mount Rushmore, or filming the Statue of Liberty so they can draw the curtains and watch it on the idiot box when they get home. Or too, it reminds me of a the oddly poignant photograph I took of an elderly man gleefully filming Stonehenge. It didn’t move, and nor did the man for quite some time; it was like he’d become stuck there, staring at his future in the stone past, and tormented that he’d have to press stop and move on. But, for what it’s worth, once he did press stop and his wife dragged him away, he had it captured for posterity.
On the following episode of Sunday Live, they had another man on who had filmed his life. This man was now blind. But in attempting to reach for the poetic, poignant and profound, the camera-jittered Michin could only ham-fistedly retrieve and polish the reflection of her face into the absurd. To the blind ex-filmmaker she said, ‘And what does seeing these films now show you about your memories of the past?’
One can only hope that when the desert-beings of the future unearth from the sunken landmass that was Britain a carton of indestructible DVDs there are some Sunday Live episodes along with the Lovejoy boxsets and the amateur films of stones. Nothing else could so eloquently demonstrate the futile, poignant absurdity of the Anthropocene.
And because Insidious Lassitude now comes music-enhanced:
Mia and cat
September 16, 2008
Oh YouTube, mother to so many millions of mirthsome shoddy-resolution clips of shnorkelling, strawpedo-ing, kitten kicking and beery leering that there is barely any space to left for anything which isn’t ‘the funniest thing ever’. Several million YouTube clips can’t all be the funniest thing ever. And that they amuse a countryful of office saps is perhaps quite tragic. The government need only upload a video of a man gurning into a toilet bowl to unleash a viral distraction that’ll keep the nation stupided until the next tea break whereupon the Sun can take over the stupifying baton. Though they may impact on productivity, the affect is negligible compared to the unrest that might occur if the proles weren’t distracted and stupided. Paradoxically, overall productivity is higher when the workers are chortling at YouTube every few minutes. That’s how things get done.
It’s a bit of a riddle, that one. Yeah, that’s right, I was lurching this Mia Riddle post toward a ‘mere riddle’ joke. That, my droves of dear readers, is the kind of crystaline wit that’s been cleansed from the internet and supplanted by videos of stethoscope-hung nude doctors mowing the lawn. So, Mia Riddle then. In the time it’s taken me to get round to posting this video, the high-resolution version has vanished. I imagine it was sluiced off YouTube to make space for a monkey on a spacehopper. Monkeys on spacehoppers is how things get done.
Such is my command of the comic, I could cue up a ‘Missing in Action’ witticism here if I wanted to. But I’ll forgo it for now, and get on with giving the Insidious Lassitude patronage to swoonsome Mia Riddle. It’d take but a faction of my many readers clickying the YouTube clippy for us to get the counter past 1000 views. Wow. If a million of my readers clicky it then that’ll only be about a million more than I have, and we’ll only be a million shy of the views a rude man dicking around with a lego set has garnered since afternoon Sun break. That’s a lot of millions. It’ll be a virtual uprising of unstupifying.
Mia’s often very good indeed. Which’ll explain why her videos are in a non government-subsidised YouTube backwater and her records can’t be found in shops. It’ll also explain why in America she plays to even fewer people than the crowd of a handful she can attract in Britain. Nevertheless, by the great democratisation of (usually spacehoppered) information that is the internet, you can lughole more of her music on her MySpace. And, now I’m doing MP3s and am hipping up this Insidious Lassitude vanity vehicle to be the hypest musical tastemaker in the whole of the Gumdropped virtual world, here are some fully downloadable clickers for all you hipsters and pop pickers to drown out the office snickers:
*****
As an addendum to yesterday’s post about - well, whatever it was about, here’s another snippet of sniping about class-alienation - replete with more Sun bashing! Excellent. This time I’ll let the famous-for-being-famous (vegetarian) Russell Brand continue the story in this stand-up clip from an Amnesty International gig.
Here’s a man so out-of-whack with the cultural leanings of those who know of him that his fame is almost as tragically of-our-times as those monkey-hoppered office goons snickering at a Wellington boot full of ice cream. What I knew of Brand was the terrific haircut that appears in the gutter newspapers everyday and the occasional snatch of attention-seeking childish TV goonery. Turns out that he’s rather more than that. Aside from all the showing-off, he’s as intelligent, left-wing, articulate, and witty as the people that read about him in gossip mags and the Sun are stupid, reactionary, illiterate, and inane. (I may be gernaralising a wee bit here.) Given his tendency for grandiloquence, arcane references, knowing snarks and informed hectoring, some chunks of his more erudite oratory (for there are attention-seeking diversions too) must be incomprensible or bewildering to your average man in the street. The average Sun reader knows no interest in socialism and animal rights, is bamboozled and stymied by literary and philosophical references, and cares not a jot for post-structuralism or thermodynamics.
Brand comes from a very working-class background and much of his schtick seems to based on the alienation of the ’feeling of not belonging to my own culture’ and the ‘perpetual embarassment of being an outsider in my own home’. This is an age-old problem that many people born (what I’m simplistically terming, for argument’s sake) working-class struggle with as they grow up educated and begin the ghetto-vaulting. Education at once liberates and estranges you. So it goes that you’re forever on the hinterlands, and culturally displaced - feeling rooted in working-class culture, but at odds with it; moving in educated circles but feeling adrift and unrooted in them. Stranded, perpetually peripheral; unhinged from each place and unaccomodated.
Around here the local WHSmith doesn’t have a rack for the Guardian. So few are sold that they sling the ones they do get in on the floor underneath the branded plastic rungs for the Mail, the Express, and the Star. Brand says he always buys the Sun alongside his morning Guardian because he still yearns to feel part of that culture and has a nostalgic fondness for it as a kind of signifier of where he came from and the ideologically uncomplicated days of childhood. But his attempts to accomodate himself are endlessly thwarted everyday he looks at it and is repulsed by what he tries to cling to as his own cultural roots. This too is familar to me, though I’ve never bought the Sun.
her good looks could’ve sailed a ship / but her will alone could’ve sunk it
September 15, 2008
As part of what will doubtless be a returning theme, here is a post about a famous (relatively speaking) vegetarian. I may use subsequent posts to evince the eons-old postulation that vegetarianism begets a more artistic disposition. And a clearer understanding of one’s place in the cosmos. Amongst other things.
But before I get amongst those other things, Jenny Lewis has a new record coming out later this month. She’s a vegetarian, has an artistic disposition, and thus logic has my thesis proved incontrovertibly. I need only write up my findings in an irreverent prose style befitting of my ’significant findings about the human condition I’ve garnered from pop culture/art and delivered to the people with whimsy’ schtick, and I shall surely be acclaimed as a ghetto-vaulting populariser of philosopher responsible for social reform and the empowerment of the masses. I’ll be regarded as a kind of 21st century Bertrand Russell, my teachings allowing the downtrodden to escape the monopolising clutches of Wal-Mart, reject 99p battery farmed chickens and embrace a self-sufficient vegetarianism which halts global warming kyboshing meltdown and allowing man to live on for centuries in a newly fecund gaiaed-up world climate. All this from my insights into a new record by a vegetarian? But oh, what insights they must be.
Before I commence writing up this proposed thesis, I’ll first conclude this unfocussed blog post about the record. Ok, here goes: I’ve not heard it, but it’s probably very good. Now, back to more fabulous freewheeling drivel from which great truths of humanity can be gleaned. Earlier, before I started to imagine emancipation and a Wal-Mart-free world, I was - rather more prosaically - thinking I could also file this post within the ‘culturally dislocated’ or ’culturally hard to place’ Insidious Lassitude dossier on (relatively) famous people. Cultural dislocation and vegetarianism are one and the same where I grew up. Being a vegetarian is but one of the incongruent things a person like me could get up to in a place like this. Others could include, say, being a bookish fop, knowing what the lumpenproletariat is, or not being whacked-out on horse tranquilisers. Though, if I’ll allow myself to betray this whilst writing a high-falutin’ discursive essay thing, I also digest celebrity gossip, have on occasion bought slacks and plimsols at Topman, and know rather a lot about about football - especially for a vegetarian, to whom stereotypically the game is boorish and unsophisticated and rather too un-limp-wristed. I mock because the lie is clearly given to this good/bad, low-brow/high-brow, working-class/some other-class paradigm. Lest it seems I’m setting this up in too (or two) simple terms, the point is not that one set is good and the other bad or whatever - the point is that they aren’t even necessarily a set; a single person needn’t be a bookish fop or a pot-bellied football goon. One can be both, as it were.
As if to prove this I shall now recount a neatly appropriate football anecdote from my vast mental repository of things I read in the Sun. (It almost certainly wasn’t the Sun, for reasons which’ll become clear.) Chelsea and England midfield dynamo and goal-machine (yuh huh, I can deploy this vernacular too) Frank Lampard has always been regarded as somewhat of a outsider in football. His father - West Ham legend Frank Lampard Snr - used the money he made in the game to send his son to private school, and ghetto-vaulting East End boy Frank Jr even has a GSCE in Latin to show for it. The working-class that traditionally make up the majority of football players and fans have always seen this (often perhaps only subconsciously) as a betrayal of the family’s working-class roots and a slight on the working-class culture - of which football is itself a big part. Lampard Jr has consequently forever been regarded with suspicion and considered a ‘Charlie’ or a charlatan. Hence even when he was voted the second best player in the world he was still routinely barracked by England supporters who still seemed unwilling to accept him as an Englishman. And hence too the hollering of ‘Fat Frank’ from the terraces - a nickname that seems less about Lampard’s physical appearance and is more indicative of fans’ distrust of the class outsider - since the industrial revolution the fat have been up in the townhouse scoffing roast while the scamps were running the machines on the factory floor. Up in the townhouse is no place for a modern dynamic midfielder to be; witness the footballing vernacular: the midfield is the ‘engine room’.
As an extension of this, it might also be worth noting the English football fan’s enduring love afair with Lampard’s England midfield partner, Liverpool’s Steven Gerrard. The received wisdom of the football fan is that Gerrard and Lampard can’t both be accomodated in the same England team as they’re too similar. Too similar in footballing senses - both box-to-box attacking central midfielders, both goal-scorers, both deadball takers, both among the best in the world. They are habitually discussed in what football managers would doubtless called an ‘either/or situation’; the accomodation of them both in the team makes the team unbalanced and dysfunctional. The similarity as players - what they are ostensibly judged on - makes clear the dis-similarities which are really what the face-off is about. They make a revealing binary construction which the average football fan and the gutter press barely make any attempt to disguise (though they’re probably not aware of it): Fat Frank the untrustworthy class deserter, and Stevie G the loyal working-class hero. One is northern - from the industrial heartland; one is southern - from the economic centre. One is a fat stroller; the other an athletic grafter. One is vaguely aristocractic to the average footie bloke; the other is a scouser. One has a Spanish wife; the other took a local lass. One is a dark handsome man who earns £130 grand a week; the other is an earthy rugged man of the people who ‘plays for the shirt’. Lampard probably even eats organic vegetarian food at a gastropub, for God’s sake; while Stevie is dependably nourished with hearty down-to-earth fare. One of these men is bad; and one is good. As football players there’s nothing to choose between them. But after all, this is a national team, and so what is really being mostly laid bare and discussed through a veil of footballing euphemisms is the identity, the consolidation of the meta-narrative, the appearance, maybe even the morality, of the homeland.
As I have neatly demostrated the world of low-brow/working-class football can be appropriated to my higher-brow/some other-class learned writings. The twain shall meet and be effectvely conflated. Identity needn’t be delineated so crudely, and indeed can encompass a kind of multiplicity of sub-identities. This multiplicity of identities is of course a principal feature of postmodern society, and has problematised the project of the self. These sub-indentities (as I am now calling them, without ever having considered if that tag makes any sense) can perhaps be confusing to one’s sense of self, and there are identity-forming activities/interests which militate against one another - and there could, I suppose, be those which are deleterious to each other and morph the self into an unbearable contested being. But let’s lighten up! So, to get back to Jenny Lewis, here she is: shimmering hot pants-wearing, fashion-curious, former child star, and LA resident. And here she also is: vegetarian, erstwhile vegan, politically and ethically engaged, articulate songwriter, who says California is a ‘desperate’ place. Because she grew up there she says that she spends most of her time avoiding ’almost everyone’ she’s ever met. Familiar.
Her last record was called Rabbit Fur Coat. The Independent said of it: ’It retains a thoroughly modern feel thanks to songs whose bittersweet and sharply observed lyrics reflect the US’s current moral crisis and articulate Lewis’s confusion at a God-fearing/God-searching America splintering under the weight of religious, racial and economic divisions, while California basks complacently in its shallow obsessions with cash, youth and beauty’. But, though Lewis feels alienated and repulsed by Vegas and LA and California, there is a part of her which she says is always drawn to fashion and appearance and the Californian shimmering of a spectacle. The assimilation of this with the rest of her identity is a constant project. She needn’t live in LA, but chooses to continue to do so. There is a sense of not belonging to her home, to her culture, to her peers. In a broader sense, maybe this is something that many American artists have been engaged with post 9/11, and the search for a national identity, narrative, and morality is certainly a recurring theme in recent US art, Rabbit Fur Coat included.
David Byrne - another (more) famous vegetarian - says of Lewis: ’her lyrics are some of the best around - they take some unexpected turns and hit some resonant truths in completely unclichéd ways.’ And then, dismissively of her penchant for what he calls ’spangley’ dresses and acoutrements: ’The showbiz elements are meant ironically’. Perhaps they have the playful touch of irony, but I think Lewis has spoken candidly enough times to make clear that she really does love spangley things. They are maybe not just acoutrements to her personality and identity.
Can she - or anyone - be a serious artist with a genuinely intelligent and enagaged agenda, and also sustain and furnish a love of designer frocks and LA parties? Are these oppositional interests, or can they arrise together and co-exist? The binary construction is depth vs surface. And like dark and light, good and bad - and even knowing and unknowing - we know one by its counterpart or opposition - Fat Frank’s not one of us, he’s other; Stevie G is one of us. In her essay ‘Some Thoughts on Feeling at Home’ Lily Markiewicz argues, in more complexity than I can be bothered to go into here, that we also understand, feel, or know involvement through disengagement - and that it is the principal project of art to alchemise this binary construction into a mobilisation of our comprehension of our self and identity. Artistic practice, she says, is a the making of place which is synonymous with feeling at home. But - and this may be the most pertinent point for those who are displaced in their own culture or hometown or country or team - home ‘references other meanings of the word to accomodate: to become familiar and even familial. Yet in paradoxical turn, the notion of becoming accomodated also references a dimension of already inscribed ‘unbelonging”.
Rather than become further waylaid with Markiewicz’s sematics, I’m grasping for a Talking Heads lyric to liberate a rather less academic denouement from this journey - a lyric to be the ’two’ of the old journalistic ‘one-two’ article punchline. ‘Once in a Lifetime’ has been going through my head, and led me into this Talking Heads cul-de-sac, so there must be within it a line or two that can redeem me from this dead-end and get me out on the open road to a dazzlingly neat and perceptive conclusion. I think I’m just striving to make some comment on feeling alienated by you’re own culture, or being bereft of signposts in your hometown, or looking for a reflection of yourself in the window of these places, or just seeing a reflection of the clothes draped on an estranged and unrecogised body. Or something. As the Independent says, Rabbit Fur Coat was about all of these things; the wish to find your self - or something else - despite yourself.
When my brain refrains the Once in a Lifetime chorus, I think I’m thinking of it as an interogation of the need to be one thing - have one fixed self or identity - in your life, and that there are things which are untenable with that. There are things which people are concurrently, things which seem deletrious to one another, but the challenge is to sustain them all, or to encompass or accomodate them all within one sense of your own identity. Maybe these could be things like being poor and valuable, rich and ethical, or other things which are posited as competing dichotomous essences. Like being pretty and intelligent, or hot-panted and literate, or spangley and serious. The project is to accomodate the unbelonging of ‘this is not my life / this is not my house’.
Here’s an MP3 of the title track from Lewis’ new record. The record may be a further set of ruminations on the perpetual wrestle betwixt a self/God/others/internal and external personal identities that we present to the world and ourselves and which life enternally unresolves.
‘He took one look at my face / And said ‘I can fix the hole is you’
the Eden valley-world and the snake
July 29, 2008
The images are familiar - the lone figure tending the land and living self-sufficiently is well-used iconography - but the connotations of such images are no less vital because they are well-rehearsed. It’d be interesting to contrast her depiction of the motif with those from the past to see the way that the nuance and significance of the imagery have changed and are different for an artist today. The inferred ideologies may be similar to those presented before - Lincoln’s fisherman looks a lot like Thoreau might’ve at Walden, for example - but artists make art which reflects the cultural climate particular to the time and society they’re working in. Lincoln, for instance, makes a decision to not depict the M6 tearing through the Eden valley, or a Foot and Mouth riddled countryside, or derelict farms, or the flooded holiday homes of people from Salford. All doubtless excellent fodder for art. But she chooses instead to paint something other than what is there, something which is really a reverie or a fantasy. All art is selective, and the way she selects and paints is different to the way that, say, Grant Wood paints a reverie of what was there when he dragged his easel up a hill next to his house. Wood wasn’t ostensibly painting what was like Lincoln is, but his paintings are likewise imbued with nostalgia and they work a similar set of emotions in the viewer - this is not now, this is what is not. And like Lincoln, this is accentuated by his flat semi-naïve storybook style.
I use Grant Wood as an example because a postcard I have here of Lincoln’s recent ‘Around the Tarn’ reminds me of Wood’s ‘Stone City’ painting from the 1930s. As well as the stylistic, and compositional and tonal resemblance, the two images perhaps make telling resonance of each other and the cultural and societal mise en scène.
Wood’s painting could be seen to engage with the issues presented by post-industrialisation America, and prophesise the issues of the direction of progress of the country. At the same time it is has a nostalgic reverence for the small town agrarianism and regional farming of early 20th century mid-America. Wood has said that he wanted to paint things the way they were when he was a child - the way he perceived them as a child, or even just the way he retrospectively imagined he had perceived them. This manifested itself aesthetically with the stylised faux-naïveté of the Plasticine hills and lollypop trees, but can also be read in the painting’s rhetoric and subtext. The image seems a simple one of rustic American painterly charm - an uncontested storybook narrative - but there are tensions within the frame that are an interesting comparison to Lincoln’s painting.
‘Around the Tarn’ is, as the title suggests, an image with a central anchor; the lines of roads and pathways lead to the tarn in the middle of the frame, the hills enclose it, even the trees lean into the centre of the picture, and the animals crane towards it too. This is a self-contained settlement. There is no suggestion of any relationship to the outside world; there is no of suggestion of any outside world. The only road that heads to the horizon leads to a house, and this has the effect of terminating the road in a destination and dissolving the sense that there is something over the horizon that the road could lead to. This is the valley as the known world, with the universe unknown, not relevant and only hypothetical. Everything needed for life is here in the valley-world - water, food, sunlight, shelter - and no roads have been built to accommodate the notion of leaving here or moving on from now.
‘Stone City’, on the other hand, has a tension between the self-contained valley-world and the outside world. It is perhaps an image of innocence thwarted or rescinded. Wood makes a central anchor of the houses and barns cosseted by the hills, but he then disturbs this by draping through it a seductively curvy road which leads the eye through the countryside of the distance and out of the frame unchallenged by the horizon. As it makes its way to the horizon it reveals other settlements on the periphery of the frame, and suggests that this is not the enclosed world it first appears. With these other farms comes the question of boundaries - this land doesn’t all belong to the inhabitants of Stone City, some of this arable landscape must be being used by some other people. The implication is that there must be many valleys like this one, and they all must be joined together. The road goes past the house on the horizon, it doesn’t terminate at the door like it does in Lincoln’s image, it’s left unrestricted over the receding plains. Rather than the distinct horizon and terminated road of ‘Around the Tarn’, Wood’s world is edgeless and uncertain. Trees funnel us over the horizon into possibility; but with moving comes leaving, with distance comes melancholy and the blue edgelessness of distance.
There is too the sense of passing through which emphasises the melancholy of this open horizon. All the windmills in ‘Stone City’ are powered by a west wind; they face left to right - the direction of progress. On the road Wood places a man on a galloping horse with the wind at his back. The figure is about to cross the modern industrial-looking bridge which separates the dark, enclosed, wooded left hand side and bottom of the picture from the light and open right hand side and top of the picture. He travels from the dark to the light, the past to the future, the bottom to the top, the restricted to the unbound. Interestingly too, the pattern of the light and dark areas are vaguely reminiscent of a Taijitu yin-yang symbol - though an inverted one. The rounded interlocking of the Taijitu is something which can also often be perceived in the harmonious lines of the knolls and sweeping pathways common to Lincoln’s paintings.
Despite the contented centred-community of houses, there is only one human figure in ‘Around the Tarn’: walking in the centre of the frame, his dungarees and sun hat mark him as a man-of-the-land. This man walks in the opposite direction to Wood’s figure - from right to left, or the direction of regression. From her studio in the 21st century Lincoln paints images of the past as a simpler time, a time of greater certainty when the world beyond the horizon was unknown and insignificant. The man and dog represent a fantasy of walking back into that valley-world - disconnecting the telegraph poles, uninventing the inventions, unthinking the thoughts, unbridging the river, and redeeming innocence.
Wood’s image is a more ambivalent one. The progress is founded on the past - the windmills that power the future are driven by the winds of the past. It is an image of a settlement relocated from the centre of the agrarian self-contained map, to a settlement which is perhaps on the hinterland of the new world but is still of founding economic importance to it. It could be seen as an image of the ambiguities of the self and the community in a national - or international - capitalist society. Amongst the cocks and the cows are telegraph poles. Bisected by the left edge of the frame and disappearing from sight is a large building that looks like it could be a church. The right hand edge of the frame is bounded by an advertising billboard half-shaded by a tree and positioned just after the road turns and begins its snake to the distance. A small path treads left to right from another church to the billboard. From behind the shade of nature and religion, agrarianism and regionalism, the billboard peers as a representation of the outside world (by its very nature it advertises something other, something that is not here) encroaching on the local. The economics of a new America are the turn in the road.
The M6 is a road with very few turns. It connects the industrial north of England to the economic centre in the south. Directions and signposts to everywhere are everywhere along this ‘Backbone of Britain’ as it moves a constant flow of traffic between named places. It’s possibly even visible from Lincoln’s smallholding-studio-farmyard as she paints a recognisable nameless place from back down the road in the Eden valley-world of a romantic imagining.
oh rise up my darling and come with me
May 19, 2008
I’ve been searching long and hard for a true definition of ‘folk music’. Does a folk song need to be old and played on traditional instruments? Is it required to be of humble or unselfconscious origins, authored by an unschooled, isolated or in some way native person? Is it possible to find a communal identity in the textures, rhythms and poetry of certain songs? What is the music that defines us?
I’ve begun to believe that a song that is universally loved and understood will endure the test of time and become folk music because it has made itself useful to so many of us . . . Some are well-weathered and others relatively new . . . What they all share in common is that they remind us of our humanity, of what we share.
Sadly these are the songs that have been gradually slipping away from us. Since the abandonment of agrarian for urban life, the swift death of regionalism and the advent of recorded music, we have left many of these songs behind as relics in printed anthologies and the field recordings of musicologists.
Natalie Merchant, sleeve notes from The House Carpenter’s Daughter
*****
Modern art is a disaster area. Never in the field of human history has so much been used by so many to say so little.
Banksy, from an ADbusters interview
Here’s a mystery for you. Renegade urban graffiti artist Banksy is clearly a guffhead of massive proportions, yet he’s often feted as a genius straddling the bleeding edge of now. Why? Because his work looks dazzlingly clever to idiots. And apparently that’ll do.
Charlie Brooker, the Guardian, September 2006
The other day the BBC used some footage of this graffiti to end a report about another calamitous day for Gordon Brown. It’s a very BBC sort of image I thought. The kind of glib graphic they routinely knock up and shove into the six o’clock news (or The BBC News at Six, as it’s now rebranded) for George Alagiah to stand in front of and deliver Third World disaster with his customary profound inanity. It’s the visual equivalent of the puns that BBC correspondent gowks like Robert Hall are unable to help themselves tossing into reports where they are inappropriate - like, say, those about poverty or environmental catastrophe - or reports where they add nothing to our understanding or experience of the story - like, say, all the other reports. Or perhaps it’s also bit like the facile way any report about the internet is nothing to the BBC but an irresistible opportunity to frame interviews in a YouTube screen or quotes in an email template.
But the image wasn’t made by the monkeys in the BBC graphics basement; it’s actual art, lest you hadn’t noticed. I know this because it was in an exhibition: last week’s ‘Cans Festival’ of ‘Street Art’ in a tunnel in London. They called it ‘Cans’ because street art is (almost always) done with spray cans, and it ran concurrent to the Cannes Film Festival. In fact it might not’ve been concurrent to Cannes, but it was a bit like the same time and, God, it was probably just too much of an opportunity to be witty or clever or whatever it is that it is. The show was oragnised by stencil/graffiti artist and street prefect Banksy, whose publications have included - wait for it - ‘Existencilism’ and ‘Wall and Piece’. Crikey! Strangely these works haven’t been received with a groan, but with the critical intelligentsia collectively smirking and reading sententious Alagiahistic proclamations of genius from the autocue. Perhaps Cans was a joke on the perceived importance and Cristal-soaked prestige of Cannes; a sort of good ol’ fashioned kickin’ against elitism. There’s the haves in Cannes and the have nots in Cans - those who are downtrodden, gritty, and ‘4 real’. The joke is a bit like those puns the BBC use on their graphics - prima facie it perhaps connotes a wry cleverness and sparkling perceptive wit; do more than glance at it though and it turns out to be a load of bosh.
That’s possibly reasonably denotive of the weakness of street art. The premise of the movement (I suppose they’d consider ‘school’ a bit elitist; “we’re edgy self-taught mavericks from outside The System, man” they’d harp) is that it’s the voice of the people - that it is art that speaks cogently for those marginalised by society or not represented by other, less inclusive, art. By the people; for the people. It’s an ‘outsider art’ movement high on rhetoric and propaganda keen to promote its politically-engaged agenda and anti-establishment ethos as the key tenets of its drive for social change. It’s therefore a particularly debilitating problem that the art itself is so impoverished of anything politically cogent, sapient, vital or interesting. When D*Face paints a sticking-out tongue onto the queen and scribbles guff on No Entry signs it is the kind of anti-establishment drivel that adolescent boys sometimes absently-mindedly piddle on their pencil cases when they’re bored in a GCSE history lesson. If this is the voice of the people then it’s no wonder Gordon Brown thought he could steal a few grand off them by rescinding the 10p tax rate. He probably took a peek at Nick Walker’s ‘Moona Lisa’ and saw that the proles were too busy mirthfully snickering at hopeless pictures of bums to care about anything. And even if they did care then they’d not have an articulate voice for their dissent; they’d probably just do some puerile doodles in a tunnel and then get back down the factories where they belong.
Its proponents see street art as a sort of folk art for the ‘urban generation’. Not just folk art that provides a light and momentary aesthetic relief from the drudgery of life, but a folk art that aspires to profoundly engage with our times, express current universal human truths and emotions, and embolden a politicised counter-culture uprising. “Look at the hope it gives the oppressed” they weasel. “Our art can be vehicle for social change, man. We’re gonna rise up and transform this fucking country!” they holler. But although it could conceivably be a powerful medium for expression, and even be a voice which contributes to political change, the art - even with the lofty rhetoric - has no substance. The rebellion is not propulsive, dynamic, witty or coherent. Calling it a rebellion is probably already overstretching it. The annunciation is callow and dumb. It doesn’t lock rigorously into anything vital or expansive, and it doesn’t even meekly suggest transformatism in a meek cowardly disembodied voice cloaked in seductive clothing. It’s a movement characterised by dilettantes basking in a perceived image of themselves as subversive sods scourging London with stenciled rats. It’s a bit teenage, like an emo kid cocking a snook from behind a sofa in Starbucks by sticking a finger up at a policeman outside while all his friends guffaw into their espressos and feel naughty and eye up the some girls wearing Topshop the Clash T-shirts.
Street art don Banksy and his mob of simpering coat-tailers would probably chunter something about art affecting social change from within - that they are using The System to break The System. Leaving aside for a second the question of whether the art is any good, there is first the question of whether it’s feasible to be part of the system - by which I suppose we basically mean capitalism, and it’s attendant asperities - and also stand apart from it and oppose it. Today everything is co-opted by commerce - the radicalism of the 60s was a packaged product in the 70s, and so on. Everything which has appreciated value - artistic value, emotional value, intellectual value, whatever value - quickly accrues economical value. If a street artist is valued on an artistic scale then it follows that they’ll also be valued on an economic one. (Or it can even work the other way round.) That’s problematic for all art, but particularly art which is founded on an antithetical ideology. Opposition is now virtually untenable or unsustainable. Whatever opposition there is quickly becomes co-opted and assimilated and ceases to be opposition. The market economy society doesn’t accommodate opposition; it eats it up and regurgitates it as another product of The System.
Oppositional politics have been chewed up and digested into single issue politics. Politics doesn’t offer alternative structures or ideologies, just ways to manage the one we have. Campaign to have some windfarms, if you like; or campaign not to have them. Lobby for a congestion charge; or be against it. Protest at the fuel price rises or don’t. But whatever issues are politicked it’s all within a system. This system accommodates simple art on single issues. The innocuous anti-capitalist cartoons of Banksy and his crew are accommodated by capitalism. In fact capitalism finds them rather useful. They’re not threatening; they won’t undermine society’s fabric, and they can be alchemised into something which has all manner of economic malleability. They’re not seversive or dangerous, but they appropriate the look of it effectively. The government are unlikely to be coerced into giving Banksy a tunnel to fill with propaganda if it was threatening to the Western order. They wouldn’t, for instance, let al Qaeda have the tunnel for a festival. Or even the BNP.
It’s not that an art that has the qualities and role of what we term folk art couldn’t exist today in urban Westernisation. It needn’t even necessarily be characterised by its oppositionality, though it’d perhaps be difficult for it not to encompass it. There is no reason too why it couldn’t use media that reflect the times. Technology like mobile communications and the internet have fundamentally altered our relationships to each other and to the world, and changed society and culture. Folk art reflects day-to-day life. It’s not that graffiti and internet-circulated stencils, digital tools and propaganda couldn’t be used in a meaningfully progressive, genuinely witty or artistic way. But it seems a bit like graffiti has suffered in some of the ways that other forms of art and expression have. It feels less cogent; more superficial, inconsequential and diluted. Perhaps there is a correlation between the development of a commercial art market for graffiti and the general dissipation of its content. Maybe this is just nostalgia. There’s always been vacuous infantile nonsense daubed on walls. But I think a reasonable argument could be made that the stuff that has now become seen as art - the marketable and the stuff that copies it, most of which it’s indistinguishable from - represents less diversity of ideas and aesthetics than it did in even in the 80s.
This is perhaps indicative of a loss regionalism, or the flattening out of culture. People who consider themselves graffiti artists or street artists are now more likely to stencil a symbol they found on the internet than mural a locality from their day-to-day lives. Dialects are abandoned and a broader idiom - often American - is used. Likewise there is less visual vernacular - a stencilled Banksy rat in Waterloo can look just like a rat stencilled by a kid in Sunderland. It was quite possibly even made by the same stencil - reproduced and held by another pair of hands and sprayed in the same way on the side of a different Starbucks in a different city. It’s not a wry comment on the homogenisation of culture, it is the homogenisation of culture.
‘The stencil [is] fast, it’s the speed of now, it’s the speed of music and TV channel hopping’ says Paul Jones, owner of Street Art gallery Elms Lester. Perhaps Street Art is just a consequence of its time, but - unlike a true folk art - it doesn’t engage with the vicissitudes of this time. It may well be a product of the time - in two senses of the word - but it isn’t necessarily an art. It doesn’t have a dialectical or didactic relationship to people, society or culture; it doesn’t aid the construction of individual or communal identities. The identities of the individual and the community are the same - far from militating against this, Street Art is just another facet of it; just another gable end to the same building reproduced throughout the urbanised West.
These ‘guerrilla’ stencils on gable ends increasingly look not like the propaganda of a militant bunch of agit-artist government-botherers, but like adverts for the canvassed versions on sale for a few grand in Bonhams or Sotherby’s. Banksy and his peeps are driving around - possibly literally - in capitalism’s signifiers wittering about their radical movement in the same way that the BBC pries through Amy Winehouse’s curtains and squeals about drugs, before scurrying away making a ‘Wino’ pun and retiring of an evening to get smashed at a cocaine party round George Alagiah’s gaff. Any sense of art is inconsequential when there’s money to be made in reductionist tittle-tattling about what goes on behind artist’s curtains and pictures of bums to be sprayed on walls.
The Cans Festival wasn’t much like the counter-culture festival or exhibition of folk art that it proclaimed itself; it was more like a theme park. A little local goverment bank holiday charade where refreshments were sold and people milled around thinking about investments in a brightly coloured tunnel while their kids ran around excitedly. Or a zoo: where wild animals are domesticated, penned up and captivated and trinkets or images of them are sold in the gift shop. The artists themselves insisted on anonymity. They truculently faced away from the camera for TV interviews, repeating the street art anti-establishment manifesto in a collective lip synch with hooded heads bowed. Banksy has always been anonymous, and since he became famous other street artists began replicating this paradoxical quirk. Identity was lost already though. Their work is reproduced by stencils. Their slogans are appropriated. Their signatures are stencilled brand names.
What does stencilling a ten pence piece with Brown’s chops on it say? What does doing it in a council-approved place say? What does using it in a BBC political report say? Perhaps it’s really a problem with context. Had I noticed the graffiti on a bridge as I was walking through town then I probably would’ve smiled as I glanced at it while continuing with my life. It would’ve elicited a response consistent with its qualities, and I would’ve forgotten it as instantly as I forgot the billboard advertising a new mineral water. But the roles that it has been given - of art, of social voice and conscience, of political agitator, of serious critically-engaged work - are ones that it is doesn’t have the substance to support. That it is being used in such roles, and that it is seen as commensurate with folk arts of the past, is perhaps indicative of the problem. It may be the way in which it is mediated - by the BBC, by galleries, by Sunday supplements. These contexts ask it to support all sorts of meanings and ask us to apprehend it entirely differently than if we had spotted it on an underpass while were stuck in a traffic jam on our way to work.
It’s not that Banksy’s work is bad. I shrug my shoulders aphateically a bit if you call it art, but it’s ok; and his aims seem reasonably laudable. But even he himself has become representative a creative and critical malaise which inflects art now. His hangers on and copyists have stymied the movement, and its patrons have held it up as radicalism and inflated its significance in line not with its quality or content but with its ubiquity. When it is posited as the principal form of expression and visual language of Western urbanisation then it looks as depressingly vapid and apathetic as the society that it targets. The voice of the people is only represented by the odd glib pun or cheap visual snark and the issues it seeks to raise and communicate - like the change to the ten pence tax rate - are quickly forgotten or whitewashed over. There’ll be no lasting artistic legacy, even to issues with far wider-reaching humanitarian implications than that. If there’s any art to engage us with ourselves and the complex interweave of society, culture and humanity, than it probably isn’t street art. If there’s an art which accurately stands for - represents, or is indicative of - the homogenisation and the subjugation of expression by capitalist artifice then street art is probably significantly more eloquent.
*****
‘Bold Jamie’ sounds like a traditional song, but was in fact written a couple of years ago by young Irish folk singer Cara Dillon. It tells the story of a young girl who elopes with a mysterious man. Her rich father catches up to them, brings his daughter home and wants the man killed for stealing his daughter and the family’s riches. It’s a typical folk tale of misunderstood identity and class suspicion replete with an ‘individual fancy vs. the judge and jailer of societal establishment’ motif. A complex and more intangible or immeasurable value - in this case love - is subjugated by economic value, or conflated with it. The girl finds emotional wealth but this is taken away from her by father. He wants her be happy and human and fulfilled but those expressions must be within his bejewelled estate of avarice.
The studio version Dillon did for the record is slightly less convincing than this rather brilliant and lucent live version. On record she sounds a bit too like some other people. Yes, that’s not necessarily a problem in folk music. But it probably is if those other people are the ones heard on the Starbucks stereo. When Starbucks goes kerching for the final time, the internet goes caput, the online repository of ‘live’ singing goes kapow, and humanity dies out in a technology-induced global warming meltdown, it’ll be the CD version that earth’s new life-forms will find. That’ll be a shame. But the record - imposition of the apparatus of commercial expedience upon human expression that it is - will at least allow the new colonisers of the planet to get to grips with the complex interweave of nature, culture, and society that humanity was subject to. They can conveniently pass the record around and burn new copies. Obviously all this presupposes that the new life-forms speak English, have CD players and copiers, and indeed that they can hear or hear in the same way as us and have a societal structure that they can relate ours to.
It may be a blessing if they only have the CD and not this internet film, because they then won’t have an opportunity to snigger and snark at humanity’s inability to correctly reproduce the aspect ratio or synch the singer’s precisely to the audio while copying a video onto YouTube, even though it’s a medium and operating system that humanity itself invented.
past tense
May 14, 2008
In 1994 the noted Dutch photographer Hans Aarsman gave up photography. For many years he’d produced exhibitions and books of photographs of some renown. But at the beginning of 90s he began to struggle with the increasing ‘artification’ of the medium, and the proliferation of art images in commercial applications. He felt the very qualities that made a photograph unique were in fact antithetical to its use as art. This was exacerbated and made profoundly evident to him by the critically-disengaged discourse surrounding the use of photography in art. He began to see art as a recision of the qualities which constitute the particularity of photography. He argued that the reproducibility of images, as well as the ease in which they can be created without any specialist knowledge or skills, were not only difficult to assimilate with art, but the utilitarianism of the camera and photography was also threatened or obscured by the increasing encroachment of art into photography. The photographic image had become conflated with the material art object, but the photograph wasn’t a unique object.
Aarsman also worked as a photojournalist, but found himself restricted and frustrated by the use of his photographs. ‘Newspaper photos insist on presenting a simplistic dichotomy’, he said, ‘that perpetual thinking in terms of pros and cons, in good and evil, the oppressed and the oppressor, left and right . . . I was searching for a way to capture the ambiguity of life’. After he quit photojournalism, he travelled Holland searching not just for a new photographic aesthetic, but for a new way to use the camera. He felt that the camera somehow always came between himself and his experience of the visible world. ‘Not for a single instant was my gaze disinterested, [it was] always accompanied by questioning oneself . . . you’re a colonist of the visual world’ he said. He began to think that the camera and the resultant image were untenable with the unfettered and truthful experience of self and visual reality that he was pursuing; they militated against his apprehension of the visual world and his experience of his self within it. The images were almost narcissistic; he was only repeatedly looking at the world as he had been conditioned to see it by his photographic eye. And that eye was only a small part of him and his visual experience.
He gave up all forms of photography when he couldn’t find a way to resolve this dissatisfaction. He felt he had no use for the medium after the co-opting of the photographic image by art, by journalistic expedience, and by commerce and advertising. He sold his cameras and focused his attention on writing visual-critiques and plays about photography.
Early this century Aarsman began using a digital camera to document the capricious and transient desires consumerism aroused in him. His mother died in 2000, and not long after Aarsman moved house. As he was attempting to reduce his possessions in preparation for the move, he came across some figurines his mother had made and given him when he was younger. His new house was small and he would have no room to accommodate trinkets and things of no use. He thought it silly to have a sentimental value for clay gnomes and teddy bears, but still he felt throwing them out was a betrayal of his mother’s memory and had to retrieve them from the bin. Once he’d made a photographic record of them though, he was surprised at the emotional ease with which he was able to throw the objects away. He wondered if the objects of his consumerist desire could be similarly divested of their emotional lure if he photographed them. Consumerist lust is propagated by images, so perhaps he’d be sated by making an image of the object of his desire. He looked around his house at all the things he’d excitedly bought and never used; objects that he’d been desperate to own but had immediately been superseded by a new allure in a shop window somewhere. The moment was gone and all that remained were monuments - or perhaps souvenirs: useless bits of ornery tush - to his caprice and ephemeral desires. He thought that maybe the act of photographing could be commensurate with the consumerist’s consummation of purchasing. Could it be a sort of Freudean relief valve for desire? It’d certainly save him a lot of money and space if it could.
Aarsman went about his day-to-day business as before, but every time his consumer desire was piqued by an object in a shop window - or on a car forecourt, or by a ‘for sale’ sign on a property - he took out the digital camera he carried on trips through town and photographed the object which had aroused his consumer lust. By doing this he hoped he could head off the desire before it turned into an obsession and a purchase.
He did this for the first few years of the century - and may even still be doing it. At some point he collected the photographs and made an exhibition: ‘Photography as Antidote to Consumerism’. Though he hadn’t intended it, Aarsman was suddenly an artist and a photographer again. In an accompanying essay he fleshed out his ideology and made a call to arms:
Let us provide some resistance. Let art stop acting as a vehicle for commercial interests. And if art is incapable of doing so, because its interests are too closely tied to those of commerce, then we’ll do it ourselves. After all, everybody has a camera in their phone these days.
*****
In America there are now companies offering to stalk people going about their day-to-day business and photograph them like they’re famous. People pay the company, tell them what they’ll be wearing and where they’ll be, and then the photographer will diligently paparazzo them for an afternoon of shopping. The resultant portfolio of photographs will capture the faux-famous browsing organic pretzels in the delicatessen, emerging from Barneys laden with boutique paper carrier bags, or whatever other commercial diversions they make of an afternoon. The photos will depict the act of shopping; the act of consumerist consummation will be recorded and the images will attest to the visual performance of the act. The burgeoning popularity of this charade has itself created a lucrative market.
Whether the boutique paper bags contain anything is probably a moot point now. The image stands in place of the object that was once the monument (in this case it’s probably a monument rather than a souvenir, since they’re shopping at Barneys) to the fiasco. Those monuments - in Aarsman’s world they’re leather swivel chairs, chromed espresso machines - were only expensive stage dressings - follies, or props - to the act, and likewise the exact content of the paper bags is almost incidental to the narrative being played out. Who knows what’s inside the paper bags draped over Insidious Lassitude’s regular English actress muse Sienna Miller as she promenades down Madison Avenue, or as she ambulates in Primrose Hill? And who cares? It wouldn’t add to the meaning of the images. The locations may change; the contents of the bags may change and never be disclosed, but the image is the same: Sienna is shopping; she is on a trip to buy. And equally importantly: she looks bloody fabulous as she does it too.
Paying to be papped is apparently proving almost as addictive as shopping to Americans. This isn’t surprising because, like shopping, it is an act that must be repeated and repeated: because it is an act - a process, a Sisyphean endeavour - once it is completed it must be commenced again. The self that is given identity by it must be reiterated; the image must be reproduced. It’s a bit like those scenes in ‘Back to the Future’ where Michael J. Fox holds a photo of himself and watches his image disappear when his identity is threatened by not acting out his role properly. In the image of shopping the lines that depict and delineate the self must be constantly gone over lest they fade away. In that way it is maybe a bit analogous to fame itself. Or even fashion, to both of which it is inexplicably linked - once an image of Sienna has been made of her garbing around New York in Boho-chic, then she must create another image to bring to the idiot Americans so they can name it something reductionist and commercially workable like ‘Factory Metallic’, and then sell it in Barneys. They’ll copy it, act it out, appropriate it, reproduce it, and make an image ‘in the style of’ the fashion.
The throwaway nature of today’s culture requires that meaning is in need of constant re-inferrment so that the self is always reinstated before Michael J. Fox’s photograph turns blank. Like shopping; like fashion; like fame; once the moment’s gone all that’s left is the paper bag and an image of a moment that was gone is the click of an exposure. The move to digital processes has only sped this process up. The gulf between object and image is even wider now than when Aarsman turned his back on photography. The image has less physical substance than ever, yet it has assumed more importance as an object. Now the image is the thing, as Jean Baudrillard once noted and Insidious Lassitude is wont to often re-quote and muse upon.
The internet is part of that substance-less materiality too, and the popularity of ‘social-networking’ sites like Facebook has added impetus to the pseudo-pap business. Apparently people use these photos on their Facebook pages. It’s hard to imagine anything more depressing, but the faux-fame photos are at least entirely congruent with the often desperate and false projections of self-image that are prevalent in such ‘places’. According to Izaz Rony, who runs a pseudo-pap business (though I don’t suppose that’s what he calls it), ‘[people are] concerned about the image they project of themselves. [By using pseudo-pap photos] they have something that is real - it’s the window they open for others to look through. They want to create the lives they want to live’. Or, as they aren’t living them, create them by appropriating the look of them, because, really, it’s the same.
Rony explains that by being pseudo-papped people ‘aren’t self-conscious anymore’, so they have this ‘real’ image to paste all over their personal Facebook billboards. Alongside the images of the individual themselves, these billboards also advertise an identity by showing images of the individual’s ‘friends’. The friends are displayed like the souvenirs of shopping are, and the number of friends is totted up for each person and displayed. Of course, almost all these friends are people the individual hasn’t spoken to in years, or are people they spoke to once in a bar to ask them where they bought their fabulous Andy Warhol metallic sweater. Most of the time only a tiny percentage of this list are actually friends (in the old-fashioned pre-consumerist sense of the word), the others are a bit like the unknown contents of the paper bag - only an incidental collection of unused objects. Or in fact images of objects, since they’re often more-or-less unknown and only garnered for image-based identity-constitution. Of course, these images - of unknown friends, plastered over a digital billboard - could in fact be images made by pseudo-paps. So, there are images of people being friends with images of other unknown people; and all the images were made by people who nobody knows because they spend their time hiding behind bins outside Barneys. It’s a vaguely nightmarish scenario.
And in a further dysfunctional twist, people pay to have themselves tyrannised and defined by consumerism and its imagery. The irony is that while people are desperately trying to appropriate the image of ‘the life they want to lead’, the image of Sienna Miller’s life is one she spends all her time trying to escape. Despairing of her deplorable paparazzi shadow and images of herself, she has court orders against photographers and is so damaged that she regularly launches berserk quasi-psychotic physical attacks on them. Which, of course, are photographed and somehow packaged up not as a woman in desperate anguish, but as aspirational imagery. I suppose it is only a matter of time before the pseudo-paps start offering faux-fights as part of their service to their faux-famous clients.
*****
Human relationships are now subject to the same image-based accumulation vector as consumerist shopping. The appearance of personal growth and progress is mediated socially through the image. The only value which is valid is economic, and all things on this scale are inferred by the visual. Social status, identity, self-validation, and personal value are inflected by the same set of visual signifiers and acts. The realms of human relationships and commerce have merged and are co-dependent, and mutually dependent on the image to hold the whole thing together. But the image is now less dependable than ever with its unfixed and contested meanings, its immateriality, erasability and throwaway nature. Hans Aarsman initially turned his back on photography because he felt it was an unsatisfactory representation of his visual reality; that it represented his self too overtly and in a way that was too simplistic. Today the photograph has become more utilitarian just as he hoped it would. But as a corollary of that it has also - in some of the ways he feared it would - meshed with consumerism and colonised or tyrannised our visual world and commodified the ways in which we understand ourselves.
The photograph at the top of this post of Miller besieged and embattled by photographers speaks eloquently of the depressing, dysfunctional and unsustainable plight that consumerism and its attendant imagery has led Western society and relationships into. Of course, although it depicts from the outside the hellish reality of a life being stalked by paparazzi, it was itself taken by a pap who contributed to the ruckus.
I rather like too the photograph underneath of Miller attacking a photographer with her handbag. The handbag, it must be said, is doubtless by Chloé or some similarly high-ranking fashion house, so - official Insidious Lassitude muse or not - it’s worth pointing out that Sienna perhaps isn’t exactly an oppositional figure to consumerism. The photograph was apparently taken the other day when she arrived at Los Angeles airport. It may possibly have been taken by a paparazzo, but it looks more like it was taken by a passer-by on the digital camera that Hans Aarsman pointed out that everyone now has with them at all times. Though by selling the picture to newspapers, the photographer has rather undermined Aarsman’s call to arms to use that camera to reclaim imagery from commerce and redeem the camera’s utilitarianism. Still, it didn’t look half as good before I cropped and Photoshopped it and plonked it underneath some high-falutin’ text about visual signifiers, so perhaps with my ‘artification’ interventions I’ve reclaimed it as a photograph. Maybe if I expressed that some that the reasons I like it are genuinely artistic then it’ll be redeemed from the clutches of The Daily Mail and the sundry other internet-world ‘places’ it was probably reproduced in.
I think I like it most because Miller is attacking the photographer not with her fists, or with a knife or a gun, but she is instead swinging her handbag manically. It’s like she has just stepped off a plane from the past, a time of greater certainty where disputes are simple, and meanings uncontested. The swinging of a handbag signifies disgust and antipathy, but it is also strangely charming and endearing. Nobody ever died from being clouted with a handbag. Like she’s a quaint English Rose from a distant land of rolling green hills and scone bakers, Sienna’s loopy handbag assault represents a polite and restrained, and ever-so-slightly eccentric English expression of displeasure. In a world of multi-national corporations, global communications, homogenised or Americanised culture, and instantly-transmitted images, the delightful swing of a handbag seems to connote a comforting residue of Englishness. Thus the photograph itself - captured on a lump of consumerist plastic, sold as a digital file, and transmitted around the world instantly - seems to say something terse but articulate about the tensions of multi-national consumerism and the threat to identity mediated by imagery.
a lamb’s eyes
May 12, 2008
I was watching something on TV a week or two ago - it may’ve been Crimewatch, or it was a show a bit like that - where the police were revealing the techniques they’d used to solve a particularly grim rape case. Down at the station the show’s presenter cast his critical eye over several dusty bin liners of vital case evidence, while a tubby detective and his officer tossed bad syntax and malapropism around with milk and two sugars in an effort to sound at once like men of the people and a little bit brilliantly perspicacious too.
Like a Chocolate Digestive-fingered Fagin, the head detective proudly directed his lackey to show the presenter the photo-fit image that they’d circulated and a photograph of the man they subsequently convicted because - they said - of the success of the photo-fit. The officer dutifully scurried to the filing cabinet and emerged with the images. The presenter swooned in what appeared to be genuine amazement. “Look at the eyes; the same eyes!” he cooed, “That’s as-ton-ishing, he has the same look in his eyes!” “Evil!!” he squealed. After much smug vindictive nodding from the grubby detective and his simpering gamin, the presenter made a further contribution to the annals of rigorous journalism by noting both images had mouths and noses. Seriously. He drew his index finger over the facial features as if tracing letters carved into an antique Ouija board: “…e…v…i…l…” he mouthed. You could see his eyes widening as he traced each of the letters; then there was a second or two of perplexed blinking while he engaged the full force of his BBC journalist acuity to turn the letters into a word. Then suddenly, mind besieged by something profound and ineffable, there was a paroxysmal thrust of the photos on to the Formica desk, like he daren’t look at the nefandous face any longer lest he himself be raped right there and then. “Despicable bastard, int he?” spat the detective between sups of tea.
Of course, the photo-fit and the photograph looked nothing alike. Absolutely nothing, save the presence of the aforementioned mouths and noses, and ears and foreheads and the other requisite Homo sapien features. And though there were eyes too, neither of the people depicted in the images looked ‘evil’ (whatever that is).
Photo-fits only ever get made in certain circumstances; they are for people who can’t be photographed, who are unknown, or who can’t be found - in almost all cases it is criminals that they represent. The photo-fit stands as a sort of placeholder for a real identity until such time as the real person is found, or the identity fixed and a photograph is discovered. They also provide a receptacle for an emotional response; a part of the identity is created by the viewer’s feelings toward the subject - the same goes for any photograph. Some facets of identity are relational, not absolute, and are dependent not on the person themselves, but on those who perceive them. The BBC sees evil; I see a man who did a rape. (Which is not to say it wasn’t an extremely severe and awful crime; the man is clearly very troubled, but not evil.) His identity is not inherent: not in real life, not in a photograph, and certainly not in a photo-fit. Evil is in the eye of the beholder, as they (seldom) say. Because they’re only made for those who are absent, the photo-fit comes with a set of implications, narratives, or connotations. In most cases the person depicted is a criminal, in most cases they’re ‘on the run’. They’re a marginal identity, no name, no location; not even any photographs of them.
It is then, unlikely that ol’ jerky-knees from the BBC will perceive the photo-fit sympathetically. It’s an image of identity that virtually comes captioned: ‘Marginal Character. Probably not human. Likely evil. Smells like the man that murdered Jill Dando likely did’. He’ll see exactly what he expects to see. And he won’t construct anything from the physical evidence of the image; unless he’s high on a phrenology-like hokum then it’s doubtful whether much can be gleaned from appearance anyway. He’ll see exactly what he feels about the man. Those eyes aren’t evil; they only look evil because they’re the eyes of a criminal seen through the eyes of someone who constructs things in terms which encompass the notion of evil. If the photo-fit artist had slotted in Ghandi’s eyes, or those of a felicitous lamb, then they would still have looked evil to yer BBC correspondent because he would still be looking at them through the veils of knowledge that this is a criminal and the veil of his own opinions on criminals. Similarly, if I looked at this new photo-fit I’d be no more or less likely to think the lamb-eyed man wasn’t evil. Though I may be moved to muse on the advantages 290 degree lamb-vision may afford a criminal.
*****
After the news and before the shows about buying property, is the BBC’s new daytime ‘Missing Live’ series. It’s a live Crimewatch-like show about missing people; instead of being contractually obliged to be spooked by evil, the presenters remain solemn and painfully reverent throughout.
The other day they featured a story about Katrice Lee. She was abducted from a supermarket on a British army base in Germany when she was two years old. The police initially reckoned she may not’ve been snatched, but may’ve run out of the shop and fallen (”plunged”, the emotionally restrained BBC said) into the river behind (which at the time was a “swollen white-water torrent”) and been swept away (”carried to a freezing death”). The family didn’t think this was likely and, convinced she was kidnapped, 25 years later they still believe her to be alive and continue to campaign to keep the story publicised. Because Lee was only two when she disappeared, her appearance would have changed very quickly. And now, as she approaches 30, she’ll obviously look very different than in the last photograph of her. A couple of years ago there was a lot of publicity surrounding the unveiling of a ‘digital impression’ of how she may look now. On TV last week Lee’s father talked movingly about the relationship he has with this image; how thankful he is for it, how it is all he has of his daughter, how he talks to it and projects narratives on to it, how it is very dear to him and he’s glad of it yet at the same time it only serves as a reminder of what he hasn’t got - how he can’t hold the photo like he imagines holding his daughter, how her identity is only what he makes it, it is a one-way relationship.
Despite all the hoopla about the digital impression and how it’s indicative of the colonisation of some previously unimaginable intergalactic outpost of science, the image looked staggeringly rudimentary and simplistic to me. It looks reasonable enough when it’s plonked - as it habitually is - next to the photo of the two year old Lee, but when it’s viewed alongside her parents then it is revealed to be rather less sophisticated. Far from looking like it’s at the forefront of ‘identity imaging technology’ (whatever that is), it looks like it was cobbled together on a Commodore 64 graphics program while Pac-Man was loading. The methodology seems to have involved cutting out her father’s eyes, her mother’s nose and mouth, and then whacking them onto a photo of her sister’s face. It looks a little like an image constructed for the children’s board game ‘Guess Who’: “Does the person have the same mouth as her mother? Is everyone consanguine to the person represented by a facial feature? Ah hah! Is the person Katrice Lee?!” Nuanced and subtle it isn’t.
It seems a little unfair and insensitive to be flippant about an image in which so much profound love, loss, and grief are invested, but it is perhaps a testament to the desperate strength of those feelings that the family are able to forge such complex and enduring relationships with such a strikingly implausible image. Of course, listening to her father talk it is hard not to imagine the emotional complexities he may experience should Katrice turn up and look nothing like this image he’s been conducting an intense relationship with and foisting narratives upon for the past few years.
Although it is hopelessly simplistic and likely wildly inaccurate, the digital impression does at least look human. What is most striking about photo-fit images is that they invariably look like they were made by a GCSE art student who can’t draw people. It seems this is a deliberate ploy to avoid giving the criminal any recognisable humanity; “he has the features”, the image seems to say, “but they’re odd and peculiar, not like normal folks’. Not like ours”. Lee’s digital impression, on the other hand, has been rendered with enough kindness that journalists have been moved to comment on her ‘caring eyes’ that are wistful and hunted, and her melancholy air. They’re certainly just projecting characteristics onto the image in the light of the accompanying narrative, but it is worth noting that the that the image has been drawn with enough sophistication to accomodate such a generous and postitive reading of Lee’s personality. Still, stick the image above a story of murder -or rape - and the same jounalists would probably draw her character a little less sympathetically. Context is likely the principal visual difference between ‘caring’ and ‘evil’.
Photo-fit image identities don’t look evil, or indeed like bad people, but it notable that they do all have a particular appearance. Cold, paradoxically-indistinct, refusing to engage, lacking any trace of emotion: these are depictions of people shorn of the things which would normally construct identity. They are rendered as a mutation of the human species; the same, but different. What’s left in this identity-vacuum is a space that needs to be rushed by the viewer’s opinion. The vacant look photo-fit identities wear is perhaps a vacancy designed to be easily filled by the emotions stirred by the attendant ‘Marginal character. Probably not human . . .’ caption.
Although Lee’s digital impression was made by a Commodore 64 and not a child who can’t draw, the main difference is in the intended use. Lee’s image is intended to invoke humanity; ‘Marginal character’ photo-fits are intended to invoke inhumanity. They need to be receptacles for different emotions. This is made clear by the way in which photo-fits made for reasons other than hunting down fugitives are drawn in a much more emotionally sophisticated way. Curiously, the student seems only to be unable to draw criminals.
You Know Me Better Than I Know Myself
April 29, 2008
The music video is nothing if it is not an advertisement for the song, is it not? When the director of one talks about making art as well as making money then what they mean, in most cases, is appropriating a style - looking like something. This, after all, is the most bankable way: tap into an imagery - a visual discourse, an appearance - that already has a set of connotations which define the artist and song. The rules of advertising apply, ie time is short, attention spans are limited, and the viewer is often passive and stupefied on a couch and is thus unwilling or unable to engage critically, intellectually, or even emotionally with the video. They’ll be a sitting duck for bombardment with unsubtle marketing manipulation. Pretty young people will do the trick. Naked ones are even better. And sparkly things too, maybe fireworks.
It’s crucial that a video can be easily read - that it places the artist effectively in a particular milieu with the minimum of confusion. There’s a visual shorthand for all sorts of pop music genres and sub-colonies; the signifiers are often clothing and fashion and they are very distinct and easily recognisable - hip hop very obviously has a different set than those of punk, for instance. In today’s visual-led marketplace even bands with small audiences are required to make videos. I’d probably denounce it as a dead art form, but it’d only invite conjecture about whether it was an art form to begin with. Generally I find them a tedious bind to even watch - not that I often do - and they must be even more tiresome to make. Necessarily, creativity must be stifled in order to streamline the product and drape it in the most easily understood rhetoric. Signifier and cliché are stitched into every shot in a way which is anathema to art.
That said, there are some opportunities for musicians whose marketable image is actually genuine creativity. Normally these musicians are - by their very nature - in the hinterlands of the mainstream. Perhaps because they are further from commercial restraints, it is these slightly peripheral musicians who can make videos which roll with a similarly more peripheral visual language.
The most recent video by nouveau art-disco avantress Roisin Murphy takes as its precept the work of Cindy Sherman. Though Sherman has pervaded mainstream imagery, it is doubtful whether the couched torpored masses would have the critical faculties and requisite knowledge of contemporary photography to enable them to unpick the references of such a video. They will though, likely recognise that it has the slightly haughty and aloof look of art. It is no surprise then that, as felicitous and accessible a pop romp as it is by Murphy’s standards, even the stonking lascivious bassline didn’t propel the song anywhere near the charts.
A musician with a high degree of visual literacy and understanding of image, as well as a career-defining interest in fashion, Murphy reiterates Sherman’s conceit of identity fluxed and flummoxed by image. Identity is constructed by appearance, by style, by visual signifiers. The video also quotes an aesthetic that is reminiscent of any number of contemporary photographers. It’s even set in the requisite suburban house, and there are the other standards - a whiff of alienation, the vague vestige of a perceived but undisclosed threat, a hint of hyper-real lighting, a quasi-supernaturalism lurking in the soft furnishings, and some other things recognisable from Gregory Crewdson et al. Both in subject and in visual style, this kind of rhetoric is well trodden by any number of contemporary photographers. An aesthetic not too dissimilar is often used brilliantly by Hannah Starkey, for instance.
Once you assume Sherman’s ruse that identity - or at least the perception of it - can be altered by image - or by the style, or fashion - then the whole shebang comes unhinged and starts flapping in the wind. Here we have a video which references images which themselves are in quotation marks. Questions arise, particularly at the intersection of art and commerce: Can you look like something and be something? Can you look like art and be art? Can you look like art and be advertising? Can you look like advertising and be art? Is it really relevant anyway? Such is the postmodern discourse.
The recognition that photographs are a construction is of course, old hat, so to speak. The image can be a set up, it can reference things outside of the frame; it is understood and accepted that a photograph is not the whole truth, but a selection of it - or even a verisimilitude of it - and that the cultural climate and the context are critical to the image’s reading. This is all basic critical stuff. Given that this is yer staple foundation to any critique of photography, it is interesting then to consider the hullabaloo created by Ryan McGinley’s latest show.
Much has been made of the way the photographs in his ‘I Know Where the Summer Goes’ show look a bit like the photographs you might see in advertisements. In particular they look a bit like fashion shots or images used to sell clothing. There has been, from many quarters, an imputation that McGinley’s photographs are too commercial-looking to be art.
The same critics who are take as given that the cultural climate and context are crucial to the understanding of work, are vitriolic that McGinley’s work is irrelevant or invalid because it looks a bit like fashion or commercial photography. Fashion and commerce though, are part the cultural context and climate, and a particularly significant part for the young or adolescent, which is who the show is about. The blind-spotting or discrediting of this context is a dubious critical position to take, and one which somehow seems anomalous and not commensurate with current critical thinking. The first utterance of ‘commercial photography’ scatters critics who’d previously held coherent critical values founded on the illusion of veracity of the photograph, how it can be reproduced and manipulated, how identity is a construct, etc. They seem to leave the axiological desert of their own creation, flee from the shifting sands of visual representation, connotation and identity, and retreat to the shade of a tree to prop themselves up against the trunk of modernism. From here they peer out their binoculars at McGinley’s photographs and chunter to the resting cheetahs that “he doesn’t have no authenticity, man”; that the images don’t show ‘the essentiality of youth’. Both of these are accusations that have been repeatedly directed - nay, doused in petrol and hurled - at McGinley.
I’d argue that if - and this itself is subjective - the photographs have some elements that are redolent of fashion photography, it is a resonance which could be complementary and sympathetic. This is after all, a series of photographs about adolescence and travel and temporality and transience. And in the images the models are very deliberately not in fashionable frocks and slacks, but are nude. And they’re often in a vast American desert. It doesn’t take much head-scratching to see that this could engender an interesting subtext for such a set of photographs - that the look of fashion photography could provide a useful undertow to the work. But I’ve not seen any discussion or considered thought about this. There’s only been a churlish harangue about the utter worthlessness of the images because of their likeness to photos used in commercial applications.
Commercial applications of photography pick up ‘art photography’, but art photography is still unable to pick up anything from commercial photography (mostly; unless it’s flagged up clearly). If it does then its identity as art is spontaneously combusted. Art, it could be argued, shouldn’t be a one way street, constantly trying to escape its shadow. In some ways this is something which McGinley’s photographs could be seen to touch on - self-awareness, the impermanence of youth, and identity and meaning. Not that anybody seems to care too much about this when there are petrol bombs to be made.
The invention of photography was a Rubicon for the image. Likewise, that photographic images are used in advertising, is something which cannot be undone. To pretend that they don’t is similar to pretending that the photograph offers a stable fixed and truthful essential nature of identity. It doesn’t; its meaning - its identity - is contingent on the world that is its context. The world we live in is capitalist, visual-led, and image-based. It is pointless and reductive to still be stuck in an argument about the dichotomy of art and commercial photography. To truculently posit them as opposites - incompatibles - is to render them Manichean; the whole world becomes good and bad, black and white. It is a recision of the particularities of photography, the very strengths of the medium that the work of someone like Sherman made overt. The identities of ‘art photography’ and ‘commercial photography’ cannot be easily separated into independent realms - they don’t have static identities which are distinct and unfettered by one another. Quite obviously the Venn diagram of photographic imagery has a big central area of overlap between commercial and art photography, and there isn’t any reason that this shouldn’t be the case. Art is a reflection - a product, if you will - of the circumstance of the creator, of their society. It is thus surprising that there remains such an abject refusal to even consider the artistic implications of a likeness to commercial photography. Commercial photography is part of the text. It can’t be ignored, or quarantined; it’s out there. And - though most people seem oblivious to it - there are times when the invocation of it is a subtext which only enhances artistic depth and substance. In McGinley’s photographs it is an apposite reference and, whether intentional or not, resonates and expands the meaning of the photographs in a cogent, and intelligent way.
McGinley’s art photos look a bit like advertising photos that are quoting art photos. Murphy’s video looks a bit like an advertisement and quotes art photos. In neither way is artistic value necessarily precluded from the outcome. Art is the primary context for the photographs in McGinley ‘Summer’ show. The primary context for Murphy’s video is commercial usage. Yet, McGinley has made money from these photographs and Murphy has made a film which is essentially an art short with a kicking disco-house tune overdubbed. Like most art these days, they both sit in the middle overlapping section (the technical name for which escapes me) of the photography Venn.
From underneath the boughs of modernism some of these critics have even been moved to witter incoherently about ‘intention’. McGinley’s intention was to make money, they surmise, ergo his work is not art. This is arguably part of the same vaguely atavistic mutter of “where’s the authenticity, Ryan?” Whilst there is an acceptance of the terms of photography in a postmodern culture - reproducibility etc - there is still some confused heatstroke-afflicted ghost with a residual hankering for things like ‘authenticity’ and ‘originality’. It’s a bit like the confusing twitch of a knee-jerk from phantom limbs amputated from current critical theory. When these critics talk of ‘authenticity’, what they are mostly talking about is authenticity of motive - ‘legitimacy’,’ validity’. Motive, of course, is even now of little - not always none, but little - consequence. Without rehashing the intentionalist fallacy here, any language is interpretative; the meanings that constitute a word are in the same state of flux as the clothes in Cindy Sherman’s images. Context is what is important. (Though some discussion could be more productively made of the intention of context.) To this end, the context McGinley’s show has been received in has been churlish, unsubstantiated, curmudgeonly, and, well, couched in stupidity.
‘Summer’ has been rounded on not just in the blogs on the nit-wit-ernet, but in newspapers by people whose opinions are held in some esteem. As well as being of debatable critical intelligence or value, the tone of criticism has also been inflected with a sort of infantile jealousy. Notably, it has been mostly a peculiarly male sort of jealousy too. This is the kind of unreconstructed vainglorious tush you normally hear in pub debates about football. It is hard to reconcile these art critics’ critical standpoint to McGinley’s photographs with the values they previously held, and reading between the lines I sense that some of the antipathy is because McGinley himself is young and acclaimed and lives in New York and has photographed beautiful famous women like Sienna Miller. He’s currently trendy and is receiving a lot of attention too, so all the invidious buttons are pushed to invoke in critics a regression to huffy adolescent contrariness and a sort of insecure objectionism. The intonation of some of the criticism is very noticeably akin to the way critics desert a band once they’ve become popular.
In a neat summation of that, the title of the show has been widely mocked and poo-pooed. ‘I Know Where the Summer Went’ was an early Belle & Sebastian B-side, and those who are hip and smug have snarked that they’re a band that is now well past their ‘cool’ zenith. This is somehow put forward as further evidence that McGinley is a dilettante; and not just a dilettante, but not even a very cool one. The cognoscenti have scrambled to withdraw their patronage and rushed across town to the moral high-ground of a Vampire Weekend gig. In their petulant braying none of them have yet noted the possibility that choosing a band who used to be young and hip - and, to invoke a fashion term, trendy - and are now ‘past it’ may imbue a show about youth with some poignant resonances. Nor that the slightly self-conscious and gauche deployment of a B-side is also perhaps suggestive of the coltish - but slightly attention seeking and contrarious - naïveté of youth. That these considerations have been ignored or supplanted by sniggering mud-slinging is the kind of truculent critical intelligence - replete in some instances with sexism and homophobia - that’d likely be rejected by the Sun for being too vapid, petulant, boorish, and inane.
In a fitting twist, the joke might actually be on these critics. Their very identity founded on the fluctuations of cool of a Scottish indie band; crying out that McGinley is too commercial to have anything to say. It is not with irony that these people crow that the models in McGinley’s photographs look too much like ‘hipster kids’ to tell us anything worthwhile about youth or identity.
I’ve only seen a selection of the images from the show, so - even though this is the internet and seeing the work is by no means a prerequisite to having an opinion - I don’t want to make an assessment of it. I’ve no problem with people not liking it - I myself am still fairly undecided about it. But what I do find problematic is the tone of a lot of the critique; for whatever reason, the work seems to have provoked an unedifying playground squabble. Perhaps taking to heart the subject of the show, the critics seem to have regressed and begun to debate along the terms that teenagers would. A lot of these critics haven’t even seen the show and are making tasteless noises based on prejudice and rumours that they’ve heard while smoking outside the school gates with the cool kids. And even those who have seen the show seem to be judging it by a set of criteria that are entirely trite, irrelevant, or inappropriate.
The question is not whether it looks a bit like this or that. The only thing which is of significance is whether McGinley’s photographs do something. Perhaps those other things come into the matter if they are relevant to the effect of the work. In themselves they are only anecdote, and not grounds to dismiss a show on. The fact that he utilises an aesthetic or a style which isn’t far removed from fashion photography is in itself not an issue that should immediately cause muck to be chucked. It seems like people can’t get beyond this surface and see the way in which the surface is being used; which is ironically the very thing they accuse McGinley of.
Do the photographs do something which fashion images don’t? Do they take the conventions of this genre and transcend their normal outcome, do something different? Does McGinley get inside the clichés and deploy the aesthetic to an end which is affecting and revealing? Is the cultural code cracked open; what’s inside of it? I’ve not seen enough of the show to tell, but from what I have seen it seems to me that it is quite possibly this very blurring of the boundary between fashion or commercial photography and art that makes the work engaging - that makes it art. That tension seems to work when depicting youth. It is perhaps something to do with an intangible quality of youth or adolescence; the way it is peripheral to both innocence and self-consciousness, but depends on them both. The photographs are perhaps reflective of this. Yes, there are elements of appropriation, and this is perhaps indicative of the way that youth is experienced. In the models and the photographic artifice there is a nonchalance and insouciance in one moment, and then in the next the models and the artifice are self-aware, gauche and slightly awkward. Both the models and the artifice have a kind of identity which is unfixed. As these models trawl through the desert the naked, they are dislocated but simultaneously full of promise; there is a sense of purpose in a place with no landmarks.
From my limited experience of the photographs, they don’t seem to have anything like the vapidity and vacuity that the prevailing critical - or not, as the case often seems - opinion suggests. It feels like these critics have got scared when they’ve seen the appearance of commercial photography encroaching on art photography. I’d like to see more of the show, but it seems possible to me that these photographs could be seen to fill the empty surface of fashion photography with something; and indeed the fashion style perhaps says something about identity through the role of the surface - which is what fashion itself can do. Filling an empty image of something with something, is a bit like the process of adolescence. It is maybe not unreasonable to consider the state of youth as a tension between surface and content; between interiors and exteriors.
that was then / this now / that was just nostalgia
April 24, 2008
Sheffield is more visible from the M1 than Newcastle. Well, Newcastle isn’t visible at all from the M1 because the M1 ceases to be a motorway somewhere not far north of Sheffield, but some of Newcastle can be seen from the A1. The road sweeps past the Angel of the North and steeply down the Bowes Incline, and at night time there is such an expansive blanket of lights that it appears all of Newcastle and the north east of England must be visible. Go there in daylight though, and it turns out that many of the lights are the Metrocentre shopping centre. Those lights aren’t really Newcastle; they’re just an appliqued pattern on the surface. Newcastle for the most part is only unfurled from a vantage point away from the A1. But from a similarly elevated perspective, the main north-south road passes closer to the centre of Sheffield, and as it crosses high above the River Don, it affords a more revealing glimpse of the city. Along the riverbanks are the vicissitudes of industry; the river a transect of industrial development, reflecting the economic growth of the city right through to the Meadowhall shopping centre. Up on the knolled raises and rolling suburban hillsides there are the houses of a leafy commuter belt. As an outsider - someone like me, native to Newcastle - it could almost seem as though the whole of Sheffield is uncloaked and sprawled over the river for every passer by to see; its history and its secrets and its tramlines all on show. Perhaps too, people who are unfamiliar with Newcastle think everything is visible from the Angel of the North.
The Angel is ten years old this year. Ten years have seen two more ‘icons’ of Newcastle join the Angel in the brochure, with the Baltic and the Millennium Bridge now forming a ‘triumvirate of cultural icons’. This ‘trilogy’ (not my words; the words of local government), is central to the NewcastleGateshead Initiative’s rebranding of the city of Newcastle as a ‘World Class’ (yes, capital letters; no, I don’t know what it means either) ’cultural destination’. This ‘culture led’ economic regeneration means that as you crest the Bowes Incline and pass underneath the Angel you won’t see any poverty as you cast your eyes over Newcastle. Oh no. Though you will see hundreds of anthropologists scurring excitedly to the Quayside. It’s they, not shoppers, who cause all the traffic jams on the A1 by the Metrocentre.
Of course, once these ethnologists get to the Quayside they’ll find the artefacts of Newcastle to be surprisingly similar to those of other cities of 21st-century England; of, say, Birmingham, or Leeds, or maybe even Sheffield. There’s a Hilton, a Malmaison, a Pitcher and Piano, some patioed recreation areas agreeable to promenading by tourists, some ‘alfresco, European piazza-living, cafe culture-styled’ bars. And the ethnologists will also find that a cultural icon of the north east need not be created by locals (like the Angel - made by Hampstead born, Anthony Gormley - isn’t), or thought up by natives (like the Millennium Bridge - conceived and designed by architects and engineers in London - wasn’t), or represent them in any way (like the Baltic - run by Americans or Norwegians, full of art from places that are not north east England - doesn’t). In fact, it’s likely far more proftiable if they aren’t so terribly parochial. The tenets of cultural iconography, it turns out, are a lot like those of economic expedience. Someone should get English Heritage on the phone, because it can only be a matter of time before the Metrocentre is proclaimed a cultural icon. Indeed, in Gateshead council’s promotional descriptions, it already has the same cultural classification as the Baltic, the bridge, the Angel, and The Sage. Like the conflation of Newcastle and Gateshead, these icons of that new place are not social, historical, or geographically specific. They aren’t signifiers for that. They are monuments to events which have never happened; icons that represent the flattening of social diversities in order to be receptacles more easily filled by commercial interest. These are monuments/places/images built with the errected as flat-pack easy-assemble icons. That is precisely their failing; iconic status cannot be inferred on something by will, or by throwing money at it. These are not familiar objects, they’re alien; they have nothing to do with the people or the local society. But the norh east was festooned with these objects as an attempt to engender regional and cultural identity; as if these things could be plucked from the air.
Sheffield too has its own regeneration and development agency. ‘Creative Sheffield’ has much the same agenda and methodology as NewcastleGateshead Intiative; it seeks to addess the issue of loss of industry and the associated problems of poverty, dysfunctional infrastructure and loss of local identity by fostering economic growth through ‘cultural’ things like Starbucks, and by erecting vapid monuments to modernity. To this end, the Tinsley cooling towers next to the shopping centre at the side of M1 have recently been the subject of discussion. Apparently they were set to be demolished, until strong objection from locals who see the towers as a link to their industrial heritage and thus a symbol of their identity. The authorities (it’s unclear exactly which body, or bodies, has responsibilty for the decision) then decided they could utilise the towers’ familiarity and make the towers ‘Sheffield’s own Angel of the North’. The idea was a novel one, entirely without precedent, eureka-ed out of thin air, apropos nothing at all: fill a disused industrial building with modern art and put tourist signs on it. Ok, so it’s apropos NewcastleGateshead. In this way the towers could be a sort of Angel and Baltic on a single site! They would have the visiblity of the roadside Angel and, like the Baltic, be full of lucrative art and big empty space that connotes modern profundity. And there’d be a cafe and a shop selling sundry associated art tat and mush stamped with the silhouette of the towers. Brilliant!
The plan according to Sheffield-native organsier and campaigner Tom Keeley, was that the space would be ’our very own [Tate Modern] Turbine Hall’. Hey, look, that’s another big industrial building filled with (much better) modern art and (equally profound) space! But, it gets cleverer yet: they were intending to fill the space with an installation by (Mumbai-born, London-based) Anish Kapoor! Lord alone knows what dimension of genius they plucked that idea out of. It would ‘really make people think about Sheffield differently’ says Keeley. Differently to how they think of it now perhaps, but the same as they already think of Newcastle or many other cities in England. The shape of the icons is different, but inside the buildings it’s all the same; behind the facade are the same connotations and the same ecomomic agenda.
But the plan has been changed again, and now the buildings are again set for demolition. On part of the site though, there is to be a £500,000 piece of public art. It will be ‘based around the theme of energy’, according to the Guardian. This way the council can have its new power station and a spurious lump of glass, lest anyone think Sheffield is not modern and hip and a ‘cultural destination’. Art and commerce: see how they sit cheek by jowl; see what agreeable bedfellows they make!
*****
The Long Blondes frontwoman Kate Jackson is one of those involved in the lobbying for the use of the Tinsley towers as an art venue of some sort. A bit like Pulp and the Arctic Monkeys before them, the Long Blondes name is unusually-often preceded by ‘Sheffield’s’. The single most important fact in understanding them seems to be that they are ‘Sheffield’s’. Their entire identity and validity as a band seems to be founded on Sheffield. From this everything follows. In reviews of the records or the gigs it’s ’