Merry Materiality
Objective: To exchange material goods wrapped in the symbols we identify as our contemporary immaterial goods and tools of exchange.
Process: Strip off these symbols and slow bits and bobs that are soon to consume our precious space and occupy our living rooms. Take away the flat image-buttons and instantaneously begin to devalue what is inside.
Enjoy the sensation of tearing; the sound of ripping.
You will only destroy what is contained within.
The moment when you dreamt of owning what is inside this wrapping paper was the original fun; untainted joy. Now your interest in this object has converted into a desire for something else you don’t have.
Merry Materiality
Download them here.
Palace, “Web Wrapping Paper - Google Maps”, 2011
Palace, “Web Wrapping Paper - Google Maps” [Detail], 2011
Palace, “Web Wrapping Paper - You Tube”, 2011
Palace, “Web Wrapping Paper - You Tube” [Detail], 2011
What Architectural Images Do
Recently I was at a large London architectural office for a meeting to discuss whether spandrels on a residential tower in the city’s south east should be expressed in glass, metal or stone. The end of the discussion took a different tack and became an opportunity to discuss how the building was to be represented to the public in an exhibition of the design in its respective borough. It was quickly established that the question of the height of the building (then pencilled in at 198 metres) was the first problem the residents would have with the scheme. Thereafter much of the discussion was geared towards how the height could be downplayed in the imagery so the prospect of its construction would simultaneously excite the public yet subdue its true height. The office demanded that a cabal be formed immediately to confront their fear that local residents of myriad enthusiasms and political leanings could turn, and stem their architectural desires from becoming real. It was decided that the images were to suppress the height of the building by choosing a strategic point at which to illustrate it with the right angle of perspective.
The architectural image is not just tailored to censor or accentuate aspects of a design, they also contain an intrinsic duality that is used by the architectural press to exploit the disconnection between viewing and inhabiting, namely that a temporal empirical reality which governs inhabitation is lost and replaced by the frozen eternal Idea. The image as a limning of material form negates architecture’s own ability to harbour ‘the external conditions of political and social struggle’[1] that ‘scatters us around in a maelstrom of controversies: namely passions, subjectivities, cultures, religions, tastes.’[2] Architectural images are so beguiling because they are political vacuums. This loss of the political dimension of space in the image masks everyday life and serves only to suggest a utopian clause of architecture: its triumph over mediocre design.[3]
The images of the residential tower in question was also to be framed in such a way to coax audiences into falling for what Robin Boyd called the feature eye-trap set by the architect[4], when we ignore what is around the gestalt, or dominating thing. A double-team of: a system of Hegelian negations that are describing what the architecture is not, and traps that focus our attention, both haggle our deepest desires to inhabit the image itself. The image creates a division of lived-space between the Real spaces we normally inhabit and what it offers us as an antidote to our space-poor experience. This becomes particularly challenging as the pervasiveness of the architectural image in contemporary culture contends with the inhabitation of our Real space because images are equipped with political and emotional instruments that don’t come with us when we visit Real space.
This reality loss is many things: the press’ cash cow, slippage, it just happens, the audience doesn’t notice or they don’t care, or comment ironically, or a part of a large ironic commentary on the way we live now, artistic in nature, postmodern paraphernalia. Whatever it is, it is endemic.
WYW - Only Look Here, and Here.
Bibliography
Boyd, Robin, 1963. The Australian Ugliness. Sydney: Penguin Books Australia.
Latour, Bruno, 2001. “Which protocol for the new collective experiments?” in Ciudades para un Futuro más Sostenible [Online]. Available at: http://habitat.aq.upm.es/boletin/n32/ablat.en.html [Accessed 25 August 2011].
Vidler, Anthony, 1993. “Spatial Violence” in Assemblage, no. 20 (April), pp. 84-85.
Žižek, Slavoj, 2007. “Censorship Today: Violence, or Ecology as a New Opium for the Masses” in Lacan dot com [Online]. Available at: http://www.lacan.com/zizecology1.htm [Accessed 25 August 2011].
[1] Vidler (pp.84)
[2] Latour (2001)
[3] Žižek (2007)
[4] Boyd (1963, pp.186)
Restricting Through (Re)defining
I can’t help but think that Jameson’s “cognitive mapping” of the world system of capital relies entirely on the self to process its complex organisation. For example, just thinking about the profundity of calculating labour-value--with its many social and geographic parameters (and each parameter having another organisation)--it seems beyond human grasp (and if that’s not enough: how capitalism can be understood not only as a “history of crises”, but also as a history of adaptive reforms. Thus any evolvable ability makes it even harder for a holistic mapping on the part of the individual).
The moment when the credit-card was introduced is something that added more complexities but poignantly, more world market liquidity. The natural thing then is to think of life post-credit-card--where money nor credit no longer serve as the abstract “symbols” to exchange with, something we never see, ever liquefying the “engine”.
The “Chase Freedom Card”: “Freedom” from seeing physical money and to lubricate the “engine”.
When a method of exchange becomes redundant(/invisible) and propels to a new abstraction, further liquidity occurs. Too, in signifying a reconfiguration of capitalism, one is called to imagine a more complex cognitive map (Just as space too will become more complex, ie. new layers of spatial manifestations, superimposed [related to “loose” zones of capital accumulation], over what is now the post-industrial baggage that is the city--a highly exciting turn of events). And yet, humans (cognition) have individual life spans, capitalism changes lives and reincarnates, after dying (if only a little).
So, in thinking of achieving a human-scale total cognitive map, key, is the need for optimised communication (in the same way articulation of space is imperative to the functionality of capitalism). Hence, what space is to capitalism, communication is to its dysfunction.
For art, an attempt to “map” it visually may see its static nature render it as limitation. Architecture, well that too is problematic (albeit, thoroughly interesting). [Has anyone thought of an architecture as a means to hinder capital generation.]
Barney, Matthew, 2003. Drawing Restraint 8: Natal Cleft. Drawing (Detail). Here Barney restricts the self in the process of creation, to redefine the act of painting.
The mental centre (armed with language, which is too, adaptable) is left standing to keep up with the adroitness of capitalism.
So is Steven Shaviro’s call for a renewed “economism” just another trend of reformism (re)adapting to the perpetual changing of capitalism? Maybe he’s right to want redefine it, and maybe he’s just fulfilling a task we should always have borne in mind.
(Advanced Capitalistic) ‘Planned-Neglect’
The behavioural patterns of the rural and the city have now been reversed. Rural land is now meticulously organised, perpetually executed/exploited beyond what could have been imagined when the industrialisation of agricultural land began. Today, as Jameson (2004, pp.49) puts it, ‘it is the city and the urban that grows wild like the state of nature… whereas it is nature which has, in late capitalism and the green revolution--but perhaps all the way back to the original neolithic revolution itself--been subject to careful planning and engineering.’ Thus, it is not ironic that there increasingly exists places, at the centres of cities, that ‘appear’ as explicit cases of ‘non-design’, or deliberate dilapidation or as manifestations of what Lacaton & Vassal might say as spaces that are ‘better-left-alone’. It is strange though that this phenomena sometimes represents the pertinent sites on any tourists’ agenda, for example Berlin. Yet when you look at it closely, these contradictory territories make a mockery of places in which neglect of a central is the only answer to solve other real and pressing economic problems. I can’t help but see a link here between these (advanced capitalistic) spaces of ‘planned-neglect’ (see images below) and the way Hollywood stars ‘dress-down’ and don a pair of jeans like something miners would wear in Harlan County, USA, Come Back, Africa or from deep down the limitless caverns of Coober Pedy. Why then--even in cities where tourism represents a large portion of its own economic condition--do these sites remain as ‘non-designed’? Similarly what motives do the Hollywood mega-stars have to ‘dress-down’ to appear more say ‘of the working class’? Only in this highly commodified landscape/existence we live in, can the ‘non-designed’ be itself a commodity: it represents the frontier of the commodity spectrum which, after so much market/spatial diversification, can the mimetic spatial/bodily accoutrements of poor/decay become accepted (like the Beuysian quest for a Gesamtkunstwerk).
Fashion trend-setters, West Virginia’s Finest.
Stars in Miner’s Jeans. Incidently the jeans are put through a labour-intensive “enzyme wash process, giving them the authentic look and feel of the jeans”.
Advanced capitalistic space of planned-neglect 1: Forte Prenestino, Rome.
Advanced capitalistic space of planned-neglect 1: Forte Prenestino, Rome.
Advanced capitalistic space of planned-neglect 2: Kunsthaus Tacheles, Berlin. Left: Tacheles three years after the fall of European communism. Right: Now. Coincidently, this site is off Oranienburger Straße in Mitte (the bearer of Berlin’s tourism core).
Advanced capitalistic space of planned-neglect 3: Caledonian Lane, Melbourne. Left: This highly contradictory space at once appears as urban residue, a site of state/commercial neglect, however this area is directly abutting Melbourne’s ‘main street’ and serves as a cove for a muddle of those whom determine the covert embourgeoisement of the space itself. Right: The new renovation of Myer department store next to Caledonian Lane. The project promises a “state-of-the-art shopping environment, inspired by some of the world’s great retailers in London, New York and Paris”. This is the architectural moment Caledonian Lane seeks to resist but actively participates in as it struggles to ‘appear’ critical of its captialistic subsumption.
Bonus (irresistible) image:
Marxian-capitalism-space-vortex: circulation | money-as-engine-fluid (credit-as-nitrogen-oxide). The finiteness of space = maxed-out credit-card. An early artist’s impression of the renovation of Myer department store. A romantic Koolhaas (2004) on ‘Junkspace’--his self-exclusionary rationale for architecture’s defecations--“…enforced derives, we meekly submit to grotesque journeys past perfume, asylum seeker, building site, underwear, oysters, pornography, cell phone - incredible adventures for the brain, the eye, the nose, the tongue, the womb, the testicles…facism minus dictator…”
Jameson, F., 2004. “The Politics of Utopia” in New Left Review 25(272), pp.35–54 Koolhaas, Rem, 2004. “Junkspace” in Content. Köln: Taschen. pp. 162-171.
