I don't know where it was but I read something recently about the design of McDonalds resturants/eateries whatever. Superficially attractive , bright lights and colours etc, open and accomodating, particular for kids, the design however has a cunningly built in time limit, after the time taken to eat your meal (I think they estimate that at somewhere between 5-10mins)they transform into alienating, uncomfortable, stark, purposeless shells: hardly a place you want to hang round in - which is the point of course, the next hungry belly needs a place to eat their burger. There's a terrific balancing act involved in pulling this off, rather than considering McDonald's architecture as merely bland, perhaps it has more in common with medieval torture devices, a carefully calibrated instrument designed with great ingenuity with a single purpose in mind - that is placing subjects into a situation poised between two aggravated states of being.
Rather than physical the discomfort is existential.
Surfaces needn't be alienating it's just some are designed with that purpose in mind. The commodity space of consumption is a depthless and literally repellent surface, over which the eye is made to continually flicker across. Again the imagery of torture comes to mind, the perpetual torments of the damned, the denial of a resting place or home. The persistent circulation around invisible circuits of frustrated desire. In this sense these circuits actually eclipse vision itself, it is almost as if we become caught up in a 'blind spot' a place of 'unvision', of 'illvisability', a kind of negative zen point, Zizek's idea of drive, of properly idiotic jouissance- "no light, rather, darkness visible".
Commodity spaces have moved far beyond the function of facilitating choice and comparison, they no longer aim to enchant either, that like a good magic trick requires a certain rhythm, the ability to pause, vary tension, like a bazaar, exist as a thing of ebb and flow. In keeping with our postmodern age, of the breakdown between forms and genre, whether the manifestation is spatial or televisual makes little difference. Trying to watch this January's Superbowl was literally tortuous. The show is now more advertising opportunity than sporting contest, and a majority of Americans watch it as such. The topic of next day conversation is more likely to be a particular multi-million dollar commercial, than any particular play. It is the embodiment of a kind of extreme attention deficit disorder, because we literally are not able to become absorbed by any particular moment, lest boredom is risked or marketing moment missed. It left me a little bored but mostly radically perplexed, the whole shindig should come with a warning attached "Not for Human Consumption".
On a loosely related topic I was reading about the opening of the new Wembley, which I must admit looks very exciting, how many dashed hopes has that building been constructed to withstand, I wonder, because I'm English. After all the extra millions spent(or is it billions), worrying about sinking foundations may be least of our worries what affect further failure on the national psyche? But it's interesting to see how the architects decided on a very restricted colour scheme, the idea being the supporters will bring the atmosphere and life to the stadium. I suppose the advertising hoardings will do that too, but all the same it is a real gesture to the soul of the game at what is still called 'The Home of Football'. The building is just a container, awaiting the immaterial energies of the players and fans.
Wednesday, March 14, 2007
Sunday, March 11, 2007
velocity of the past
Then came film and burst this prison -world with the dynamite of the tenth of a second, so that now, in the midst of its far-flung ruins and debris, we calmly and venturously go traveling.
- Walter Benjamin
What Benjamin would have said about the blogsphere, YouTube and the rest today, is as they say, pure conjecture. A tenth of a second is painfully slow and plodding by our standards, much as Benjamin would have marveled (as we still do) at the people in his childhood who thought the speed of the bicycle exhilarating and provocative . The quote captures Benjamin's complex (an overused word, misapplied much methinks) reactions to technology and experience. This progress is both deeply destructive, obliterating, but we cannot turn completely away from it, in fact its consequences are as deeply attracting as in some way they are replusive. The world destroyed was a prison, but its destruction leaves only 'far-flung ruins and debris'.
It makes me think about the ruins of bombed cities, where children played, in fact now I think about it, it reminds of what the painter Keifer said in a recent interview - for him to play in the empty shells of buildings was an literally an enchanting thing.
- Walter Benjamin
What Benjamin would have said about the blogsphere, YouTube and the rest today, is as they say, pure conjecture. A tenth of a second is painfully slow and plodding by our standards, much as Benjamin would have marveled (as we still do) at the people in his childhood who thought the speed of the bicycle exhilarating and provocative . The quote captures Benjamin's complex (an overused word, misapplied much methinks) reactions to technology and experience. This progress is both deeply destructive, obliterating, but we cannot turn completely away from it, in fact its consequences are as deeply attracting as in some way they are replusive. The world destroyed was a prison, but its destruction leaves only 'far-flung ruins and debris'.
It makes me think about the ruins of bombed cities, where children played, in fact now I think about it, it reminds of what the painter Keifer said in a recent interview - for him to play in the empty shells of buildings was an literally an enchanting thing.
Saturday, March 10, 2007
visit to the Barnes
I took time off from my presently soul-squashing job and drove down to the Barnes Foundation last Friday. The Barnes Foundation is at the moment caught up in controversy regarding a proposed relocation to a more central and modern venue. So as perhaps the chances of seeing this collection of Impressionism and other stuff are perhaps fewer, I really had to go. I lived in Rome for a few years and made the mistake of never going to all the churches and seeing all the art until I was about to leave, you take it all for granted. Likewise I think the Barnes deserved a visit now rather than later.
It's a pretty strange gallery by today's internationalist, global standards, paintings are often more than a dozen to a wall, objects from Egypt, China, and pre-Columbus America are displayed in cabinets under works by Matisse and Klee. There was in Barne's mind a reason for every arrangement, and the present 'crisis' centres on whether the displays can be disrupted. It is like giant curiosity cabinet, though when you go into the largest room, it is exhilirating. There is something light and optimistic in spite of the tattered faded cloth wall covers. Seeing paintings in real life, in real time, that are considered 'key' in some sense, is exciting, as a spectator about to stand in front of them, ownership is about to pass to you, if only for a short time,if you sort of like painting in the first place, that is. I know 'ownership' is a weighted word, not totally irrelevant but also over-determining, because this is a space that can convince you that there is room for places and experiences that do not in the end fundamentally rest of a notion of property - of ownership. This is part of the mystery of painting, objects that are in themselves pretty unremarkable, fragile, hesitant flat objects that can be easily damaged, flimsy things that become objects of ridicule when put up for sale and fetch huge amounts of money, but given a wall, a flat surface, an almost marginal place, how else do we think of the wall, can create a film, a surface, that is a place for something profound to happen, and continue to happen. A little bathetic perhaps but to hell with it.
Perhaps Barnes liked Renoir a little too much, but even those nudes are so physical, so material, how Impressionism and then Matisse were concerned with the density and weight, the consequence almost of the world. We think generally that this art is airy, light, ephemeral, superficial, but really, especially with Cezanne as the linchpin, it is the description and equivalence of a physical reality that is there at the centre of things. Even Matisse - nothing doodely, terrific density, which makes 'realist' art pretty pale in comparison, and even pendantic in some strange way, as if reality had to go cap in hand to the artist and ask for the close attention, and precision of more exact representation.
Very positivist, very un-Romantic, even a painting like 'Joie de Vivre' of pre-Lapsarian life, is basically robust and somehow 'consequential', though I don't know what I mean by this exactly, they register in the world, and are about this registering - like notches on a stick perhaps.
But I think this painting is great, although it was probably a couple of small works by Klee that I would have tried to smuggle out. Just the feeling of invention, of rule breaking and rule making - simultaneously occuring in the same moment, bending everything into relation with it, by that I mean a total perceptual world. Connections between making and perception that seem very distant to us now, rather like the ancient Greeks appeared to medieval artists, the sense that a world has been closed off to us and become inaccessible. Not that it is, rather I think today with some exceptions art-making is self-identitified as somehow autistic, paratactic processes predominate, deriving from ironically much of this art, but it is a partial understanding, perhaps a deliberate misunderstanding. Even Seurat the champion of divisionism, to say he is the 'father' of empty mechanism in contemporary art is a meaning we retroactively evoke. Impressionism can 'look' like the start of a reductive process, as something that had to lead to the next 'discovery' or breakthrough, although of course it didn't really, we have only imperfect and often contingent reponses by subsequent artists to what went before. I think to realise this is liberating.
It's a pretty strange gallery by today's internationalist, global standards, paintings are often more than a dozen to a wall, objects from Egypt, China, and pre-Columbus America are displayed in cabinets under works by Matisse and Klee. There was in Barne's mind a reason for every arrangement, and the present 'crisis' centres on whether the displays can be disrupted. It is like giant curiosity cabinet, though when you go into the largest room, it is exhilirating. There is something light and optimistic in spite of the tattered faded cloth wall covers. Seeing paintings in real life, in real time, that are considered 'key' in some sense, is exciting, as a spectator about to stand in front of them, ownership is about to pass to you, if only for a short time,if you sort of like painting in the first place, that is. I know 'ownership' is a weighted word, not totally irrelevant but also over-determining, because this is a space that can convince you that there is room for places and experiences that do not in the end fundamentally rest of a notion of property - of ownership. This is part of the mystery of painting, objects that are in themselves pretty unremarkable, fragile, hesitant flat objects that can be easily damaged, flimsy things that become objects of ridicule when put up for sale and fetch huge amounts of money, but given a wall, a flat surface, an almost marginal place, how else do we think of the wall, can create a film, a surface, that is a place for something profound to happen, and continue to happen. A little bathetic perhaps but to hell with it.
Perhaps Barnes liked Renoir a little too much, but even those nudes are so physical, so material, how Impressionism and then Matisse were concerned with the density and weight, the consequence almost of the world. We think generally that this art is airy, light, ephemeral, superficial, but really, especially with Cezanne as the linchpin, it is the description and equivalence of a physical reality that is there at the centre of things. Even Matisse - nothing doodely, terrific density, which makes 'realist' art pretty pale in comparison, and even pendantic in some strange way, as if reality had to go cap in hand to the artist and ask for the close attention, and precision of more exact representation.
Very positivist, very un-Romantic, even a painting like 'Joie de Vivre' of pre-Lapsarian life, is basically robust and somehow 'consequential', though I don't know what I mean by this exactly, they register in the world, and are about this registering - like notches on a stick perhaps.
But I think this painting is great, although it was probably a couple of small works by Klee that I would have tried to smuggle out. Just the feeling of invention, of rule breaking and rule making - simultaneously occuring in the same moment, bending everything into relation with it, by that I mean a total perceptual world. Connections between making and perception that seem very distant to us now, rather like the ancient Greeks appeared to medieval artists, the sense that a world has been closed off to us and become inaccessible. Not that it is, rather I think today with some exceptions art-making is self-identitified as somehow autistic, paratactic processes predominate, deriving from ironically much of this art, but it is a partial understanding, perhaps a deliberate misunderstanding. Even Seurat the champion of divisionism, to say he is the 'father' of empty mechanism in contemporary art is a meaning we retroactively evoke. Impressionism can 'look' like the start of a reductive process, as something that had to lead to the next 'discovery' or breakthrough, although of course it didn't really, we have only imperfect and often contingent reponses by subsequent artists to what went before. I think to realise this is liberating.
the perils of eating (only) your greens
from a NYT review by E.Rothstein of 'The Bloodless Revolution' by Tristram Stuart - Sunday Feb 25th 2007
This is vegatarianism's lure and vegatarianism's trap. Along with its heightened awareness of the value of life, it brings a heightened desire to bring a new world into existence. And the greater the ambition, the higher the cost; the greater the purity, the stronger the purge. Many Nazis, as Stuart asserts, ''were either vegetarian or interested in related issues" because they, like the Stalinists of the same period, believed they were ushering in a new age, answering to a higher law. But in this quest for lost paradise and in the name of superior virtue and high moral feeling, how many doses of deadly mercury have been fervently administered? It's enough to make one take up meat?
It's just amusing in a provocative way that the humble cause of eating exclusively greens, because let's face it we are under little threat from vegitarians, might also be indicative of forces whose other expressions are far from the mundane and innocent.
We micro-manage perhaps as a defense mechanism of some sort, those seemingly harmless attachments to certain habits perhaps contain treacheries, that on at a larger scale, become potentially authoritarian. Foucault and Deleuze sometimes talked of 'micro-fascism', the building blocks that enable larger misuses. What are the progressions that this takes - from minor to major? From the minor and quite often positive to the larger, major and more unwieldly, and therefore potentially dangerous abuses.
This is vegatarianism's lure and vegatarianism's trap. Along with its heightened awareness of the value of life, it brings a heightened desire to bring a new world into existence. And the greater the ambition, the higher the cost; the greater the purity, the stronger the purge. Many Nazis, as Stuart asserts, ''were either vegetarian or interested in related issues" because they, like the Stalinists of the same period, believed they were ushering in a new age, answering to a higher law. But in this quest for lost paradise and in the name of superior virtue and high moral feeling, how many doses of deadly mercury have been fervently administered? It's enough to make one take up meat?
It's just amusing in a provocative way that the humble cause of eating exclusively greens, because let's face it we are under little threat from vegitarians, might also be indicative of forces whose other expressions are far from the mundane and innocent.
We micro-manage perhaps as a defense mechanism of some sort, those seemingly harmless attachments to certain habits perhaps contain treacheries, that on at a larger scale, become potentially authoritarian. Foucault and Deleuze sometimes talked of 'micro-fascism', the building blocks that enable larger misuses. What are the progressions that this takes - from minor to major? From the minor and quite often positive to the larger, major and more unwieldly, and therefore potentially dangerous abuses.
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