Download pdf - Useless – Critical Writing in Art & Design

UselessCritical Writing in Art & Design

Royal College of Art, London

143 Machines and Metaphors Nicola Churchward

155 A List Jigna Chauhan

161 An Idler is Resting Jeanette Farrell

172 Image Credits

174 Colophon

176 Codicil John Dummett (continued throughout)

4 Introduction John Dummett

11 Understanding Repair Peter Maxwell

25 To the Condemned: ‘Off With Your Head!’ Clo’e Floirat

33 Abridged Preface for Lives of the Critics by Osith Chich Jonathan P. Watts

46 A User’s Guide to Oxymoronic Machines

Elizabeth Glickf eld

53 A Luxury of Failure: An Interview with Bruce McLean Christ ina Manning Lebek

71 $xP(x) ∧ ¬$x, y(P(x) ∧ P(y) ∧ (x≠y)) David Morris

81 Leaking the Squalls Natalie Ferris

93 Blowing Smoke Up Your Arse Anna Bates

107 A Damned Nuisance Charmian Griff in

123 Apousiokoumpounophobia Dora Mentzel

131 Appropriation of the Defunct Freire Barnes

5There are 11 trillion words in the 130 million books in the world. In this remorselessly expanding volume of words there are, inevitably, errors. Some will be accidents of spelling or grammar, some will be falsi-fications or deliberate misquotes, but en masse they flower into strange tumours of thought, and compul-sive misunderstanding.

This recurring problem of writing has preoc-cupied keen minds throughout history, as if it were a sentient object capable of Understanding Repair. But spelling mistakes and bad grammar are only the tip of the iceberg. An essential feature of language is its ability to assert or deny facts, and the printed page exudes a particular authority and prestige that can overwrite first-hand experience or intuitive sense. In many cases the questionable authority of the text has limited consequences, but on occasion the printed page has led to proclamations like To the Condemned: Off With Your Head! Although tragic for those under the blade, the effect of non-existing books on suscep-tible minds is worse. Lives have been squandered in pursuit of imagined volumes like the ‘Necronomicon’, the ‘History of the Land Called Uqbar’ or the Abridged Preface for ‘Lives of the Critics’ by Osith Chich. But this search for the impossible, for what cannot be, does at least offer a degree of solace, it gives the patient and perhaps deluded scholar A Luxury of Failure.

Comparable to the literal black holes of imagined books is the confusing fog of meaning engendered by clumsy or deceptive theory. Drawn from the Greek theoria – ‘contemplation, a looking at’ – theoretical writing is either endlessly interpretable speculation or a matter of $xP(x) ∧ ¬$x, y(P(x) ∧ P(y) ∧ (x≠y)). For the wandering reader, lost somewhere between logical propositions and unlikely elucidations of contemporary culture, the experience of reading can be like an encounter with English weather: dense

Introduction

by John Dummett

4

76 been read, decreasing to 10 per cent through the ninth, tenth and eleventh centuries, and from the twelfth century it fell below 1 per cent. The gradual decline will continue, from knowing whole chapters, to paragraphs, to sentences, to now, when only one word is legible. Soon, only the first letter will be readable, then the first half-letter, until finally only a faint spot of ink on a page will be comprehensible. And it is on this minis-cule blot that a dizzying array of theory will one day be constructed.

But enough, now, An Idler is Resting, with a wish for the future luxuries of uselessness.

theoretical paragraphs Leaking the Squalls of wintry showers that blow in and out of academia. But not all theory is Blowing Smoke Up Your Arse: although many philosophical writers are A Damned Nuisance, the groaning shelves of the Humanities do some-times offer something useful to the erudite student. But what is most desperately needed to navigate the 130 million books piled high and dusty in those rusty mechanisms (commonly called libraries) is A User’s Guide to Oxymoronic Machines. Only with this on per-manent loan can the disciple of knowledge lose their Apousiokoumpounophobia of contemporary culture and see the machine of the ‘post-modern’ in its true light, as a direct Appropriation of the Defunct histories of radical modernist politics.

Among the cold showers, spelling mistakes, complex logic and lethal falsifications muttering and mumbling in the nooks and crannies of the 130 million, there are gems that offer the avid reader supreme cog-nitive Machines and Metaphors for understanding.

But this understanding has always been partial. In the seventh century A List of all the books in the world would have numbered 10,000, and it has long been a practical impossibility for a reader to know the entirety of the textual universe. If a person starts read-ing from the age of 15, at a rate of 40,000 words a week, with an average book length of 85,000 words and 2010’s global average life expectancy of 67, our undaunted reader would be able to read 7,000 books during their lifetime; this is only 0.005 per cent of the books in the world. Conversely, if all 130 million of them were com-pressed into a single book, our 0.005 per cent reading would cover less than two words of that impossibly condensed volume.

And the ability to read first hand this hypothetical volume has, since the seventh century, been declining rapidly. By the eighth century, 20 per cent of it could have

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The Roberts 606- is a throwback to a time when cheap merely meant not overly expensive. I saved this radio from the skip because it was, to my mind, a beautiful thing. It had the sort of assured, mid-century styling that displayed quality through material and proportion rather than fea-ture set or complexity. That and also the fact that when you plugged in, it worked – or after a fashion. It could grab a signal and push it out through the mono-speaker with lit-tle (given age and use) appreciable distortion. It had more trouble holding that signal, however, and would, whether after a few minutes or hours, decide to detune itself, slowly rolling the notes of whichever, presumably, distasteful song was playing into a warm bath of static. This could be alternately characterful or an annoyance.

I had no real intention of trying to fix the orphaned Roberts 606-, though its absent-minded wandering

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Peter Maxwell

Understanding Repair

by

repair’s relevance to attitudes of consumption and pro-duction. Did my experience have any value in the wider discussion of how design addresses its audience? If not, then what was conspicuous about its absence? My first thought was to see whether anyone still worked in that industry – was there still a living to be made out of repair-ing the things we took into our homes?

The repair shops that used to operate in the high streets of many towns and cities are now a rarity, most having given up or diversified to such an extent that repair now forms only a marginal portion of their business. I found Michael Maurice in the one place where those with such rarefied interest could find community – the specialists online message board. He was keen that I should visit him at his home and workshop, the base from which he travels out to assess and if possible, reconsti-tute the failing technology of those still inclined to keep rather than replace. Michael deals in ‘brown goods’, that is, home entertainment – hi-fis, dvd players, televisions and radios – but his job has become ever harder over the 26 years that he has been in the trade: the margins are smaller, the goods cheaper, the technology more compli-cated and the customer less willing to pay to fix something that may cost less if bought new. This last would seem to be the ultimate sticking point, a question of simple eco-nomics and low consumer expectations.

But, as Michael points out, it is not only demand side factors that drive this attitude. ‘There are no factories in electronics that want things repaired – for instance they’ll price a television at £400 and if you want to replace the screen they’ll offer to supply it to you, but for £1000’. Manufacturers also used to provide training programs for those third parties that wished to fix their products

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Peter Maxwell

12 had recently begun to grate. I held the thing up to get a better look at it, to allow the light to interrogate its sur-faces (metal, wood, leather, various brittle plastics) more closely. The base panel, seemingly fixed, was in fact easily removed by pulling it sideways and out of the invisible metal clips that held it in place. Beneath that a battery housing had the message: ‘waning – Do not operate on mains with this unit removed.’ To the side of this, where it did not reach the full width of the radio’s body, a metal tab with an up-turned lip invited pressure and, sliding free from a short plastic spur, allowed the battery housing to lift out. After decoupling two wires (green, red) this could be laid to one side, its power supply and transformer evident. The interior of the main body was now entirely accessible: fuses, transistors, coils and other less recogniz-able components. These were all arrayed along one simple circuit board upon the corner of which a sticker read: ‘waning – In the event of module failure please return to Roberts Co. ltd for replacement.’

What I found affecting was the generosity of this object, its openness. These aren’t abstract or theoretical terms but the simple relational factors of experience. That last, buried missive from the manufacturer was an expec-tation of visitors. It was also a positive sign that this was a thing that could be cared for and perpetuated. Despite the warding off, it was telling of past-attitudes that took purchased products as entirely amenable to the interfer-ence of the end user, attitudes of ownership that have since undergone serious transformation. The 606- made itself understandable in a way that was unfamiliar to me. The 606- was something in which I could be involved.

It was this sensation of ‘involvement’ that I was keen to explore, and with it, perhaps to take measure of


themselves, but five to ten years ago the last of these were beginning to shut down. Not only that, but the service manuals that were once widely available and through which anyone could learn the functioning of a particular product are now stored in restricted online databases. While these negative gestures may only seem to concern the enthusiast or professional, they are still a telling indi-cation of an industry’s desire to create a knowledge barrier between the exterior and interior of the goods it supplies.

As it is, Michael tells me, he will be out of a job in five or six years. He already charges half of what he rightly should. He believes people are no longer interested in the services he offers or the skills base he has spent dec-ades developing. After that, he says, he had no idea what he might do – ‘this is all I know’.

Talking to Michael, and hearing his glum prediction of impending obsolescence, put me in mind of a certain character, one Bud Calhoun, the prodigious engineer of Kurt Vonnegut’s 1952 debut, Player Piano. The novel is symptomatic of the prophesying of mid-century science fiction writers, those eager to use the hope and horror of technology’s mixed promise to colour an unknown future. It deals directly with the consequences of a society that pursues technological progressivism above all else. His depiction is an America of extreme social stratification along meritocratic lines, with those whose skills that are most easily replicated by mechanical counterparts, blue-collar workers in factory jobs, the first against the wall. The mass populace, now feckless and increasingly resent-ful of the machines that have usurped them, provide a perfect ground for fermenting the revolution into which the book eventually erupts. For Vonnegut the fulcrum of the man-machine debate is simple; it is a question of

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Peter Maxwell

14

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‘Works. Does a fine job.’ He smiled sheepishly. ‘Does it a whole lot better than Ah did it.’

Like Bud, Michael’s expertise had, paradoxically, made him increasingly redundant. It is an obtuse situation: those best able to understand machines are made obso-lete even as that technology gathers in influence. Aged 14, Michael had discovered a magazine called Practical Wireless and soon after, its sister publication, Practical Television. This last contained a course instructing you in how to build your own colour set. Despite appeals, his parents refused to allow him to attempt the challenge, not only because of the daunting complexity of schemat-ics and diagrams, but also that the £400 cost of the com-ponents was, in 1972, almost as much as a factory made model. ‘You didn’t get the kudos of being able to say that you built it yourself, however.’ This was indicative of a deep desire, a need to know how something worked that lead Michael into a career in which his skills have been entirely self-taught through studying manuals and trial and error.

While the newest machines tend to be designed in such away that if one component goes, it often has to be scrapped, ‘old stuff can usually be repaired, there’s very little of it that can’t’. This is where Michael’s job crosses over with his passion for returning vintage television and audio equipment back to full working order. Out the back, in his workshop, he points to an imposing look-ing black and white set that he’s been looking forward to working on. On the other side of the room is a stack of early portable record players, the type that come interred in their own thick hardwood cases. Occasionally someone with a similar fascination but less expertise will contact

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Peter Maxwell

16 understanding. In one passage he describes the process by which the very first worker was, essentially, rendered impotent:

Paul unlocked the box containing the tape recording that controlled them all. The tape was a small loop that fed continuously between magnetic pickups. On it were recorded the movements of a master machinist turning out a shaft for a fractional horsepower motor…this little loop in the box before Paul, here was Rudy as Rudy had been to his machine that afternoon – Rudy, the turner on of power, the setter of speeds, the con-troller of the cutting tool. This was the essence of Rudy as far as his machine was concerned…

In Vonnegut’s dystopia men’s movements are transferred to tape recordings that allow machines to mimic their dexter-ity and practical knowledge and then apply it with expo-nentially increased economy. Man completely gives him-self over to machine, is subsumed within it, and thus makes himself inadequate, ineffective as anything but one-time originator. It is a process that allows one party to compre-hend the other completely but then to refuse reciprocity.

This paradigm is most fully tested in the figure of Bud. As a gageteer, he is emblematic of American man’s limitless technological ingenuity – Bud can design and fix just about anything. Despite this, or even in spite of it, this ability is also his undoing:

‘Ah haven’t got a job any more’, said Bud. ‘Canned.’

Paul was amazed. ‘Really? What on earth for? Moral turpitude? What about the gadget you invented for –

‘That’s it,’ said Bud with an eerie mixture of pride and remorse.


Of course you’re right. It’s just a hell of a time to be alive, is all – just this goddamn messy business of people having to get used to new ideas…I wish this were a hundred years from now, with everybody used to change.

It is a sentiment that speaks directly to our contemporary relationship with technology, of generations born beyond the development of the computer and entirely unimpressed by its pervasion. It is a position that has largely forgotten those first abstract fears, but also the wonder and active desire for machine interaction that gives both Michael and Bud Calhoun such profound pleasure. Neither, how-ever, are as atavistic as they had first appeared to me. Increasingly they represent the role models for those now rediscovering the joy of taking the mutely packaged items with which we are all encumbered and fashioning them into something more expressive. They aren’t technically repair men or women, nor interested directly in manufac-ture, but have pulled a term across the digital divide to best explain their interest – they call themselves hackers.

Hacking as a culture has taken that ethos of the crusading (or to some, cavalier) digital counterpart, a creature of codes and keys, and mixed it with the rather less glamorous world of the do-it-yourself home improve-ment fads of the ‘80s and ‘90s. Its operatives are the sort of people who spent their child hood making tin-can-and-string phones or water pistols out of soda bottles and bicycle pumps. Now that they have grown up they are turning their washing machine into a go-kart or rewir-ing the central heating. They refuse to sit blankly in front of so many unresponsive boxes and sealed possessions, instead they are intent to repair and improve. The param-eters that they work against are also the same as those of

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Peter Maxwell

him to resurrect a piece to which they are particular attached, paying far above the odds to see it put back to right. At the fringes, if only, there is still this occasional moment of recognition, not just of the worth of an object repaired, but also the act of reparation itself.

As Player Piano closes out, Vonnegut explores this same, ineluctable drive. After the uprising, during which every machine to hand has been violently decom-missioned and with the authorities circling, the defacto leaders of the revolution survey the destruction they have enacted. They happen upon a group of excited citizens gathered around a vending machine, engrossed by Bud’s attempts to fix the thing:

The man had been desperately unhappy then. Now he was proud and smiling because his hands were busy doing what they liked to do best, Paul supposed – replacing men like himself with machines.

Vonnegut’s novel thus ends in the exasperation of an unre-solvable question. While their leaders may have wished to live out some Luddite fantasy of open-fire cooking and hand-washed shirts – a therapeutic disavowal of technol-ogy – the revolutionary mass is satisfied in recombining those things that they have just torn apart. It is a tentative suggestion that instead of either rampant progressivism or wholesale conservatism, what is desired is the mutual understanding of symbiotic relationship, the back and forth of a practical discourse.

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The novel is also incredibly prescient, not in its representation of an entirely mechanised future, a depic-tion that is unavoidably rooted in the imagination of its decade, but in the offhand prediction by the book’s lead character, Dr Paul Protius:


But beneath these left-field projects runs a funda-mental interest in re-engaging with an environment many of us dismiss as incomprehensible. Scott Burnham, a leading interpreter of the movement explains, ‘the emer-gence of a hacking culture which is now responding to the physical rather than the digital is evidence of a public will to repurpose the objects they own and of a desire for a new relationship with the objects and systems they buy and use’. It is an attitude that sees such objects not as closed but contingent upon the interactions and needs of both user and good. Hacking is a response to the intense occlusion and uncommunicative nature of the things with which we are now surrounded. Its practices are based on a desire for an intense knowing of our owned objects and a happy disregard for cultural and technical barriers of permission.

Looking for further clarity, I asked Burnham how he might characterise this drive in terms of ‘understanding’:

Understanding is key, as is emotive relationships. These are important, but another thing I think it is tap-ping into is the simple human emotion of connection…we want to open, we want to connect with the things that surround us. So we repair, we hack, we find alter-nate use – part to understand, part to connect. Both are vitally important. If you think of the popularity of “behind the scenes” or “making of” DVD features and TV shows – we want to understand what is presented to us. These are effectively opening the source code of these forms of entertainment.

If hacking is indicative of changes in attitude, it is still necessarily post-production, with users working against the intentions of the original author. Michael’s assessment

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Peter Maxwell

their titular predecessors – it’s all a question of access and permission. Access is simply parsed as the extent to which the manufacturer or designer might want to keep you out, and the tricks, blocks and solvent based glues they use to police your property. Permission is a more nuanced, if related, concept. Online it would read as the level of clearance and, thus, agency given to a user. Real world questions are instead phrased as: How much ‘permission’ do I feel I have to tamper with the goods that I have pur-chased? From what position is that implication of author-ity directed? Where does the knowledge exist that would let me approach this object on equal terms? willitvoid

ywaanty? As Vonnegut’s lead proposed, most of us are now simply used to a change that we interpret as per-mission denied. The hacking culture is such a proposal’s staunch riposte.

Make Magazine is a print and online publication that has come to act as a fulcrum for the hacking move-ment, providing a central community and knowledge base for disaffected consumers. It could even be described as a technosavy antecedent of Michael’s own Practical Television. It voices its dissent with the blithe assertion that ‘if you can’t open it, you don’t own it.’ This is the sub-heading to their manifesto, A Maker’s Bill of Rights (and that they choose the manifesto form gives you an idea of the communities self-perception), lines of which include: ‘Components, not entire sub-assemblies, shall be replace-able’, ‘Schematics shall be included and Consumables, like fuses and filters, shall be easy to access.’ There is a healthy air of indignation about these declarations, as the rhetoric of the title forewarns, and if these rights have no real claim to authority, then the manifesto seeks to propa-gate the change that will make it so.

20


how much better you feel…there is quite an interesting forensic problem in understanding products before you go about repairing them, which from a product designer’s point of view is hugely useful’. When he was a boy, Grange said, a weekly job in his grandmother’s house was to open the back of the radio in order to remove the battery; this would be taken down to a shop to be swapped out for a pre-charged replacement. Even that simple job of ‘disconnect[ing] the terminals, that was the beginning of a relationship between the maker and a repair process’. It lead, he ventured, to an interest in knowing what other components might fail and have to be replaced, and from that the skills needed to work on the thing yourself. Those shops, the ones in which you might not only buy your television, radio or white good, but also return to have any malfunction addressed, provided a vital link. If this was not quite between the manufacturer and consumer directly, it was at least with an operative conversant in the objects proper handling. You knew that even if it was beyond your own ability, there was someone down the road that likely had the answer, to whom the machine was not a mystery. ‘That’s the nub of it. My repair enthusiasm would attempt to resurrect those kind of places’. Design that accounts for repair in such a way, from conception to corruption is a wonderfully magnanimous gesture; it is an extended hand instead of a firm rebuttal.

Grange stated that, at its core, his enthusiasm stemmed from a belief that repair is in some way ‘an honorable pursuit…[even] that it is a moral pursuit’. At first I felt a little uneasy about these terms, that they were too grandiose or too onerous – but why not? There is a lot at stake, not only the obvious issues of sustainabil-ity and economy but also, to use another onerous term,

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was clear in that it saw manufactures as being complicit in hastening the withdrawal of any holistic comprehen-sion of the goods we purchased from them, but were the designers they employed so recalcitrant? A designer’s first inclinations could not be so far from those who are gal-vanised by The Maker’s Bill of Rights, so why was this not evident at the storefront? One answer remains the omni-present pressures of cost, margin and profit, but we might look even earlier in a designers development, before such restrictions take full force.

The Raspberry Pie, a basic personal computer no bigger than a credit card and costing less than a couple of dvds, was recently launched by a uk based initiative. While it has impressive specifications, in its unsheltered, bare circuit board construction it appears as something you might more likely find protruding from the back of a broken vc. It is as honest looking a piece of technology as you might find. Created in response to one tutor’s frus-tration that students with an interest in computer science arrived at university knowing very little about the actual workings of the machines they had spent years using, its aim is to offer an affordable and approachable device on which school children can learn to program. This reminded me of an article I had read, one that covered Kenneth Grange’s recent retrospective, and contained a small paragraph that mentioned a long held fasciation Grange had with idea of setting up a course in repair, to bring that idea right in to learning process.

The sense communicated by the article was a little off, Grange told me – there was to be no course and idea was rather inchoate – but it was truly a proposition that fascinated him. He described what he saw as the ‘near-intellectual reward in pursuing repair, quite apart from

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Whose idea was it to cross the Adriatic Sea to �eal a Greek hat for our French alphabet?

Long a controversial issue in the French linguistic universe, the cicuflex

^

has become the chief symbol of the ‘language of Voltaire’. Nevertheless it periodically comes under threat. Only a few years ago the cicuflex was the subject of another Franco-French psychodrama. When it was suggested that the cicuflex was unnecessary and could therefore be removed from the French page (‘À quoi sert l’accent

25To the Condemned: ‘Off With Your Head!’

Clo’e Floirat

of fulfillment, of actually caring about and for your pos-sessions. That isn’t materialistic and it’s not indulgent. As Grange reiterated throughout our conversation, it is a question of honor; repair demands understanding and respect between people and things, and between produc-ers and consumers. It is an assertion of kinship that stands as a mark of conviviality. This, then, is the reason that I still return to my finicky, petulant Roberts radio, waiting for it to trip up and then undoing the case to inspect its array of transistors. Now, however, I return confident that such curiosity is not misplaced, but an attitude central to contending with a present articulated by technology.

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by


As a result (s) remained in front of (t) for the fore� in its pages. However, swept up in the reforming mood of the Enlightenment, the Académie repented, perhaps anticipating the revolution which was to come at the end of the eighteenth century. The third edition of its di�ionary featured the cicuflex for forêt and many other ‘improved’ words.

The cicuflex is an archaeological accent. A pre-cious trace of lo� letters, of noble etymons for some, it is a sacrilege to alter or remove it. Attention! Patrimoine! Ae�hetes of the noble art of fine writing have declared the cicuflex to be an endangered species. What was once the pariah of the French alphabet has become, centuries later, the pinnacle of French linguistic iden-tity. The essence of the matter lies in the poetic dimen-sion of a sign that signals another sign that no longer exists. The cicuflex is a �igma of hi�ory.

Today its legacy is to be found in the propensity – tacit rather than explicit – in French lettres towards graphical ennoblement. The cicuflex holds something of the sacred.

It is a sign of prestige, an instrument of social di�inc-tion, and even proof of gentility. Is the cicuflex not ju� a luxurious accessory, when its sibling, the accent grave, could so easily replace it in order to prevent any semantic ambiguity? Is it there so that the dip-pen-lover can �ay the keeper of the language and defender of the written word? The cicuflex is kept on life sup-port and this is all the more magnified because it is vain. The cicuflex is pure décor.

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circonflexe?’) a passionate debate flared up in the French press. Even a new set of rules for the use of this accent – limited in scope – drawn up by the Immortels of the Académie Française, has only been patchily observed in the years since. To know how to use this uncertain sign, French schoolchildren are taught magic incantations and surreal poems as mnemonic devices: Le chapeau de la cime, they chant, est tombé dans l’abîme (the hat of the mountain has fallen into the abyss).

The cicuflex signals the deletion of a consonant in a word (usually (s) or (e)), or it marks the former sound of a long vowel, more often related to oral tradi-tions than written ones. Hôpital was originally spelled ho�ital, and forêt was spelled fore� in Old French. Although inconsistently applied, this sign is a graphic witness of the hi�ory of French �elling reforms, a head�one for a lost letter or a memorial to an older word. In fact, the a�ivi� who argues for the cicu-

flex is a�ually fighting for the graphic memory of a sound that disappeared … sometimes as many as ten centuries ago.

During the Middle Ages some French phonemes faded. The decline of some consonants was accompanied by the lengthening of the vowel, which preceded them. Some – particularly typographers and grammarians – felt the need to note this expansion in the written word and decided to adopt an accent which served this func-tion in Greek: the cicuflex. Yet the majority of Francophones did not ‘hear’ this change so clearly. In fa� when, in 1664, the Académie Française published its first French di�ionary, it eschewed this accentuation.

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To the Condemned: ‘Off With Your Head!’

on its head, abime (abîme / abyss) would sign away what cime (cime / top), it is said, has bequeathed it? The voute (voûte / vault) would be nothing but an arch about to col-lapse. And the flute ( flûte / flute), marcato-less, would be sustained to sound mezzo piano, a fermata.

Colossal delicacy, sentimental rhetoric or spelling delir-ium? It may simply hang around for the beauty of it.

French �elling appears rather archaic – at least in certain respe�s – when compared to the Darwinism of communication. A word has two forms, verbal and written. Both oscillate together. Yet the second delays the first, not without good reason. The verbal moves very fa�, whereas the written form has �ood still for too long. And the gap is widening as �elling reforms floun-der. Ever since French was weighed down by all these phantom letters, the �elling war between the support-ers of ‘visual �elling’ and the poets wanting to capture the intrinsic sound of the language has made the cicuflex oscillograph fluctuate wildly. It has gone up and down over the head of the Francophone and yet has never been swept up by the wind of revolution, which would have blown some of the dust off French �elling. It is a hat that seems adjusted, desperately, to prote� classic French language from the modern era. There is no room for variation at the edges, even though much of our system of �elling is totally divorced from logic.

The cicuflex has turned out to be more than ju� a grave marker; it has become a vital disguise, a co�ume worn to climb a little higher up the social ladder.

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Clo’e Floirat

The cicuflex draws on a family passion inherited from an ae�hetic preoccupation with the consonant (s). The letter (s) placed before the letter (t) was conjoined into a single glyph, called a ligature,

�

and it was nothing more than �ylish. It deserved to be used for no other reason. The mute (s) was the monadnock, the la� hurrah against phonic erosion. Developed by medieval scribes and passed on into Renaissance �elling, the preconsonantal (s) did not transcribe a sound. It was a memory and a tribute; its inclusion is a question of aes-thetics and culture. More than just being a graphic sign, it was graphic design. In this regard, this sign or ligature was the basis of French �elling, as was the cicu-

flex that succeeded it. The cicuflex remains an ornament that reveals the ambiguity of French �elling, too long �uck between the written and the �oken, between letters and sounds, between the remembered and the forgotten. It is a paradoxical alloy of the use-lessness and cultural legitimacy of the language. The cicuflex is the venerated icon of an ambiguous �elling that nothing can justify, but anything can legitimize.

This winged diacritic has at least had the merit of �imulating the imagination of generations of readers. Do you realise that without this air wavelet, without this swallow on its shoulder, without the pointed hat

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Qu’on lui coupe la tête!

Qu’on lui coupe la tete!

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Clo’e Floirat

The concept of hypercorrection, introduced by Wiliam Labov in Sociolinguistic Patterns, describes an attitude to language driven by the fear of inferiority and the failure to conform. An aspiring writer, afraid of making mis-takes, will try to outdo the upper middle classes in the use of pre�igious forms and styles.

One would rather risk too many accents than not enough. In other words, it is a bigger mistake to miss an accent than to put one or two too many.

The cicuflex, and in fa� the whole family of accents, con�itutes an un�able and hazardous zone in French language. These turbulent areas are the primary sites of inaccuracies. If the cicuflex is the black sheep of the herd, it is also because most writers do not understand its raison d’être. Its melodic embellish-ment has lo� its tune, becoming a decrescendo to silence. Under�ood in terms of the eighteen cases that prove the rules, the cicuflex is only read as an etymological or hi�orical reminder for a deleted hiatus, encouraging mi�akes and immersing the writer in insecurity.

We have created an imaginary world in which �elling has become something sacred, the essence of the motherland. It is the flag; it is Notre-Dame; and it is La Marseillaise! Spelling has become more important than the language itself, where purists chase the hyper corre�ive cicuflex and the language sentinels hang on to it.

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I am fully aware that most who have written on the sub-ject firmly and unanimously assert that being a critic is secondary to being an artist. I also realise that there are some who attribute the desire to be a critic as the conse-quence of being a failed artist. A forensic pathologist by training, Osith Chich squarely admits to having little feeling for poetry and art. It is this training that no doubt has prepared her to examine this corpus properly. Lives of the Critics is written pungently and economically with masterly delineations of character – an Eisteddfod of vivid description and anecdote.

Any survey, regardless of subject, must necessarily be selective or comprehensive. Indeed omissions are their own rhetoric. To date, the most comprehensive survey of modern art criticism (by modern I mean 1917 – the year of Viktor Shklovsky’s ground breaking essay Art as Device) is Jane Francis Chantal’s Comprehensive Survey of Modern Art

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Jonathan P. Watts

Abridged Preface for Lives of the Critics by Osith Chich

There is no cultural document that is not at the same time a record of barbarism.

Walter Benjamin

Identify; locate; apprehend. I interrogate texts and lives, inhabiting their sk(e)in.

Osith Chich

Earlier this year I received a commission from a London publisher to write the preface to their forthcoming title Lives of the Critics by the British writer Osith Chich (Trouser Press, to be pub-lished December 2013). At the time of my writ-ing, Lives of the Critics was yet to be finished. Although the publishers supplied only a partial manuscript I proceeded with the commission in good faith. Last month I received news that Chich had been taken seriously ill with suspected nicotine poisoning. For the time being Lives of the Critics is on hold, however after some nego-tiations with the commissioning publisher has allowed me to make my preface available in an abridged form for this publication.

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3534 Criticism (nit Press, 1994). Chantal’s seventeen volume pig-skin bound survey follows an encyclopedic format with pellucid chronologies of its subjects. However it is with limitations: 1993 marks the terminal date of the sur-vey. Despite Chantal’s best intentions to update the work bi-annually – a task made possible by interns, post-doc stu-dents and revenue from book sales – its publication made little impact. Without funds CSMAC never went into a second print run. As her critics pointed out, there had to be a more cost effective approach to this project – although nobody was particularly forthcoming with a solution (‘pigs! think of the pigs!’ one critic deplored). Chich’s work belongs to a world of radical online publishing pos-sibilities simply unavailable to Chantal. While, however, Chich acknowledges the advantages of Wikipedia without terminal dates, she insists upon the enduring need of an editor (she abhors the label ‘curator’) to exercise judge-ment, to act as a signpost or as a filter of quality. In this book Chich presents her essential selection of voices in criticism. Her way of bringing them to life in print differs to Chantal’s. In this respect Chich’s dedication in the epi-gram is instructive: ‘For David Thomson who made a dictionary a two-way mirror.’ Thomson, whose monu-mental book A Biographical Dictionary of Cinema (now in its fifth edition), was first published in 1975 and subse-quently reissued A Biographical Dictionary of Film in 1980, 1994, 2004 and 2010. Thomson’s entries on giants of the European New Wave to Golden Age Hollywood are vicari-ous, sometimes prejudiced, indictments of filmmakers and their works. True, while it is a biographical survey of the filmmakers, it is also an expression of the biography of the biographer, each re-issue an accretion of Thomson’s mores.

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1 ‘The police is first and foremost an organisation of ‘bodies‘ based in a communal distribution of the sensible, i.e. a system of coordinates defining

modes of being, doing, making, and communi-cating that establishes borders between the visible and the invisible, the audible and the

inaudible, the sayable and the unsayable…’ Jacques Ranciere, Politics of Aesthetics (Continuum, 2007).

‘Works nowadays arrive with built-in critical com-mentaries,’ wrote Henry James, ‘like opening the door to a guest to find him accompanied by police.’ James here is concerned by a diminishing of the altruistic generosity of exchange between writer and reader. As he sees it, criti-cism and the critic interfere in this exchange, behaving as police. Carrying out designs of the state, the police have the power to control what can and cannot be said, and what can and cannot be done.1

Here the critic oppresses the artist and patronises the reader. Sometimes the critic is characterised by the artist as being a terrorist. British art critic Peter Suchin experienced this during his year long spell as ‘Critic in Residence’ at the University of Northumbria. At a meeting for a forthcoming group exhibition, for which Suchin had been asked to write the catalogue essay, he was introduced to one of the artists as the critic, to which she replied ‘oh, the enemy’. If we are to believe George Steiner then the critic is a eunuch:

Who would choose to be a literary critic if he could get a verse to sing, or compose, out of his own mortal being, a vital fiction, a character that will endure? The critic lives at second-hand. He writes about… It is not criticism that makes the language live … the bright young man, instead of regarding criticism as a defeat, as a gradual, bleak coming to terms with the ash and grit of one’s limited talent, thinks of it as a career of high note. These are simple truths (and the honest critic says them to himself in the grey of morning).

Published some two hundred years earlier Samuel Johnson’s parodic essay Dick Minim, the critic resonates with Steiner’s sentiment. Johnson’s man, an apprentice-brewer by trade made rich by inheritance, built his new

Jonathan P. Watts

2 Writings in Charles Baudelaire’s The Painter of Modern Life first appeared in 1860 and would be recognised as the first modern art criticism. One

hundred and fifty years later Jacques Derrida’s deconstructionist literary criticism is the mainstay of Anglo-American humanities departments.

A statue of Derrida by British artist L. Leaman stands near Dalston Junction in Hackney by the now defunct CLR James library.

trade on eavesdropping conversations in coffee houses by the theatre. ‘Criticism is the means by which men grow important and formidable at a very small expense,’ Johnson begins his essay. ‘The power of invention,’ he continues:

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has been conferred by nature upon few, and the labour of learning those sciences which may by mere labour be obtained is too great to be willingly endured; but every man can exert such judgment as he has upon the works of others; and he whom nature has made weak, and idleness keeps ignorant, may yet support his van-ity by the name of a Critic.

Johnson’s critic is lazy and, like Steiner’s, impotent: where Johnson’s critic had a small cock, Steiner’s has none at all. Everywhere the critic is a pariah. In the throes of death French critic Saint-Beuve is alleged to have lamented that ‘No one will ever create a statue for a critic.’ But, of course, that was in 1869.2

The value of the critic is a changing history of ideas and while the examples cited here are necessarily selec-tive, they furnish a fairly consistent transhistorical mise en scène of bad feeling towards the critic. It is for this very reason that Chich’s is a noble undertaking. Not only does she take on the Hazards of Biography, she does so in a field of such ill-repute.

There is Robert Tatwin whose career developed in the rich West End gallery scene of the mid-nineties. He wrote with the brisk bloodless quality of I.A. Richards. Initially writing catalogue essays Tatwin moved to the Financial Times and The Art Newspaper as a reviewer. He soon realised that by writing favourable reviews of exhibi-tions he would not only receive a fee from the papers, but often a little thank you letter from the artist and, more

Jonathan P. Watts

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nothing but the dark side of the lives of the characters (not their work) she makes it utterly undesirable to imitate them in anything. At the risk of demoralising the reader, Chich makes clear her unflinching commitment to life writing, presenting alcoholic, misogynistic critics who write, hungover, in a spirit of misanthropic melan-choly. In doing so Chich wants to question the (predomi-nantly male) attitude that to be ‘critical’ and ‘objective,’ one must be cynical and miserable.

Nor does she spare us whimsy or the downright complex situations critics are often forced to negotiate. Take for example the young and brilliant Henry Finland. Finland completed postgraduate research with J.L. Austin at Oxford before leaving for Paris. Here he met key members of the Tel Quel group, absorbing the lessons of semiotics. Following a duel with a member of the Maoist Althusserian group Uniori de la Jeunesse Communiste (a bullet brushed Finland’s thigh) Finland renounced his ‘commitment’, returning to the uk to establish an advertising agency that put into practice all he had learnt in his years abroad. Long since retired to a big house, Chich interviews him and learns of his desperate retali-ations in those initial months back in the uk ‘As a young man you take these things seriously. It was a personal war, Clausewitz style, and of course I knew I would be derided,’ he tells Chich. ‘I came up with these absurdist tag-lines for the company that would poke fun at their high-minded endeavour. “Advertising – It’s a piece of Peirce”; “I’m de Man!” or ‘Choose us and be Saussure you’ve got the best.” Eventually I took advice from a young Saatchi and decided to drop that aspect of the brand.’

In an important sense criticism is at the root of the making of any artwork. It is a very particular form of

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Jonathan P. Watts

often than not, the offering of a piece of work. In five years Tatwin amassed a great collection of artworks and through his knowledge of the art/gallery nexus, began dealing. The November ’09 edition of Private Eye depicts Tatwin as an obese man in a suit being grudgingly passed a dia-mond studded skull by a homeless man.

Chich has been accused of an illiberal and captious method and a general haughtiness of manner, indicative of a feeling of superiority over the subjects of her Lives. On this point critics of Chich perhaps muddle hubris with honesty. ‘If nothing but the bright side of characters should be shown,’ Johnson once remarked to Edmond Malone, Irish scholar and editor of Shakespeare, ‘we should sit down in despondency, and think it utterly impossible to imitate them in any thing.’ This comment relates to Johnson’s own feat of biographical writing – the Lives of the Poets which inevitably has been an influence for the author. Chich takes Johnson at his word, not spar-ing the darkest sides of these characters. At times Lives of the Critics makes for an agonising read and, I expect, there will be those impelled to reconsider their heroes. Behind this is an ethical question of no small consequence: what do we lose in historical richness by cleansing the writer’s biography? She will undoubtedly be met by the rebuffs of those invested in the legacy of these subjects. Chich is a risqué writer, an accountable writer. It could also be said that she is a nihilistic writer. For Johnson showing only the bright side could create an unbridgeable gap between the aspiring poet and their impeccable hero, ending ultimately in despondency. Dimming the bright side would be generative – a kind of Freudian-Hegelian negation, motivating the aspiring poet to learn the lessons of his father, but ultimately slay him. Where Chich shows

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not a few critics in the Lives. Parroting Sol Lewitt, Ben Biscop (b. Swansea, 1954, regular contributor to Artscribe) announced in 1972 that ‘The one thing to say about art criticism is that it is one thing. Art criticism is art crit-icism-as-art criticism and everything else is everything else. Art criticism as art criticism is nothing but art criti-cism. Art criticism is not what is not art criticism.’ More recently Thomas McEvilly, founder and former chair of the Department of Art Criticism and Writing at the School of Visual Arts in New York City has said that ‘Art criticism is really its own genre of literature.’ For him art criticism is porous, a mix of the essay, poetry, philosophy and anthropology. It is cross-disciplinary in the best sense, drawing its resources most recently from developments in the humanities. In the round, Lives of Critics provides an impressionistic sketch of art criticism’s identity. Art criti-cism is not a fixed discipline, something dramatised as in several of the characters encountered in this book.

After a brilliant five years of vital, livened criticism attacking the political Left for what he perceived to be its phobia of the aesthetic aspect of art, John Ogilvie3 spent his subsequent career in persistent defensive actions. His liberal humanist belief in the transformative power of artworks meant he was frequently accused of arrogance and skepticism. His work is characterized by the consist-ent malapropism of confusing the word ‘generous’ with ‘erogenous’. Byron Suey has called him the ‘aristocracy of critics’ and praised him for the length of his books. Towards the end of his life Ogilvie maintained that the only book he ever read was Lawrence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. His last work on Jackson Pollock called Yankee Doodle was written entirely by the author dressed in drag as an experiment in writing and passing judgement

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3 Chich maintains that Ogilvie is the basis of the inadequate critic charac-ter in Martin Amis’s novel The Information.

Jonathan P. Watts

criticism. The extent to which artists perform actions – conscious or unconscious – about what is to be left in or removed from the work is a process of self-criticism. By the mid-seventies there was a sense that the art world was becoming too bureaucratic, indexically linked to the mar-ketplace. On Practice by Mel Ramsden, published in New York in 1970, diagnosed the situation: ‘Consider the fol-lowing: that the administrators, dealers, critics, pundits, etc. who once seemed the neutral servants of art are now, especially in New York, becoming its masters… today institutions have become autonomous. They constitute a bureaucratic tyranny which brooks no opposition. They are in other words logically separate from (our) practice.’ A friend of the curator and critic John Fisher posted this article from New York. Fisher so loved his relationship as a critic with artists, but it confirmed a suspicion that he had felt: that something had come between the artists and these outlying others. When he heard a shipment of maga-zines with Ramsden’s essay was coming into Southampton he, in an act of desperation, he met them at the dock and tore out the pages of each copy. For Fisher institutional critique signaled a decisive severance between the artist and the critic. He is alleged to have died of a broken heart.

The perceptive reader will notice so far I have used ‘criticisms’ and their contexts interchangeably: liter-ary criticism, general cultural criticism… art criticism. Each has its own logic of development, its own relation to the academy and the market place. What, we might reasonably ask, is art criticism? No one ever studied art criticism. Only in recent years have we witnessed the launch of specific postgraduate programmes in criticism in art and design signaling a broadening and liberalis-ing of art schools. It is a question that has preoccupied

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deference to the great critic the department instructed her to leave. Whyte in fact never returned to the univer-sity, instead traveling in Russia where she worked as the English correspondent for the organ of the communist party Pravda before returning back to the uk in 1979. She wrote an influential column in the arts section of the Guardian newspaper until one day six years later she left to work on the docks in Liverpool.4

It is a familiar story. At the tail end of a Thatcherite reality some of our greatest critics left the uk for American universities, including Janet Woolff, Victor Burgin, Dick Hebdige, John Tagg, Thomas Lawson, Hilary Robinson and Gwen Whyte.

If an author such as Clement Greenberg could be accused of spurious aloofness, at the beginning of the nine-ties the political-cultural Left could be too. The theologi-cal judgements passed by the likes of Fry and Bell seemed no less so than the Left’s. Today spectres of the radical cultural Left legacy remain. Dick Touche author of F***-Art Book wants, Chich tells us, to break through the pro-cess of structuralisation and closure of capitalist society to implement an enduring moment of opening. In opposition to a concrete fullness of response to the object he is devel-oping, what he calls a soft empty concern for his object so that he might dispossess it. His development as a critic is noteworthy for its instability of organisation and incoher-ence of response. His opening is increasingly expanding. Chich seems to think his criticism pays for the radicality of its challenge with almost complete vacuousness. Touche seems to be moving today towards a post-critical relativist position, ‘return to beauty’ and belle-lettrist sociology that coincides with his retirement from the academic toil of teaching undergraduate students in 2010.

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4 She also performed with Gang of Four on their 1979 Entertainment tour, but subsequently denounced the band on

Pitchforkmedia.com when they allowed their anti-capital song Natural’s Not in It to be used by Microsoft for television

advertising. Allegedly she is to be heard singing on Mark Stewart’s 1996 single Dream Kitchen.

Jonathan P. Watts

based on nothing other than women’s intuition. Ogilvie sided with E.P. Thompson in his critique of Althusserian Marxism. Ogilvie established his own vanity press. His books were read only by he and his friend Roger, and the Israeli army who applied his concept of ‘the potent’ in military strategy.

The impact Roland Barthes’s writing had on British intellectual life from the late sixties onwards should not be underestimated. Besides Christopher Prendergast, an early translator of Barthes’s Sign of the Times, Stephen Heath can be credited as the first collec-tor, systematic translator, advocate and populariser of Barthes in the uk. Barthes, via the masterly translations of Heath, taught artists and critics alike that they are not immune from being affected and influenced by the socio-political value system of the society in which they live. In the sixties continental Marxism in its various partisan guises animated a moribund field that was still heavily influenced by the formalism of Bell, Fry and, in their American inheritor, Clement Greenberg. Marxism provided the tools to break out of the straitjacket of bourgeois values and dismantle the spurious aloofness of British critics of the Bloomsbury heritage. Ostensibly, at least, Roland Barthes was the ocean towards which all streams flow. When that ocean froze over – if indeed it ever did – the structural transformation of crys-tallized water formed the ice rink across which several generations would skate.

In the entry for Gwen Whyte, Chich recalls the young English undergraduate at the University of Manchester meeting F.R. Leavis in 1967. Leavis was leading a seminar on the canonisation of Gerard Manley Hopkins. When Whyte arrived late and did not bow in

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writing of Gottfried Benn, Thomas Bernhard and W.G. Sebald dovetailed with an exposition of the French film theorist Christian Metz’s ‘suture theory’ in cinema and Jannis Kounellis’s 12 Horses of 1969. His writing on the donkey (including a donkey made-up to resemble a zebra in Syria), an allegory of the passive voice in image/text pieces of English inter-war modernism. Ruffin eventu-ally defected to it in the States to establish a scientific theory of reception.

Chich has entered the den and made it a house. For this undertaking she deserves admiration.

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Jonathan P. Watts

In many ways Chris Ruffin is the strangest most contradictory character in Lives. Chich begins her chap-ter on Ruffin by describing three photographs pinned above the writer’s desk. John Paul Filo’s Untitled (Kent State: girl screaming over dead body), May 4. 1970; Bob Jackson’s Lee Harvey Oswald Shot, 1963 where the body of President John F. Kennedy is lithographed out in grey, a gift to the critic from the Chilean poet Juan José Lasa Mardones; and finally a reproduction from Life Magazine of Robert Capa’s Falling Soldier. In a piece of adroit psy-chologising, Chich deduces that Ruffin understands his role as critic in a post-68 world as being to ‘take the bullet for the public.’ As a young man Ruffin concentrated so intensely on his critique of the conditions of other peo-ple’s judgements in his writing on art that he wrote the artwork out. His copy of a review of James Coleman’s 1985 exhibition at Dunguaire Castle, Kinvara in Ireland, never made it to print on account that he made no men-tion of Coleman at all. In his name Ruffin published Objet petit a, a, a, and Pathology of Tautological Critique, point-ing out that hyper-criticality might also be a Significant Silence. Ruffin then established cwi (Critical Writers International Movement) inviting Gwen Whyte to join who refused on account of his ‘perversely indulging his own hermeneutic ingenuity at the expense of society at large’. Ruffin attempted to not only critique the judge-ments of others but also to attain an incompleteness of response and to develop a strict irrelevance in devel-oping his response into commentary. He would abstract improperly from what was in front of him and make premature generalisations about that thing in front of him. His speculative study of gâteau and the Austrians in the

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4746

The Futurists lauded them, artists at the Bauhaus cre-ated ballets in their honour and the pioneer of industrial efficiency, Frederick Winslow Taylor, timed their smooth operation down to the one-hundredth of a second. Yet for every engineer or artist who has vaunted the qualities of precision, calculation, flawlessness, simplicity, speed and economy as the hallmarks of the machine, there have been others who have begged to differ.

The present day is no exception. In their attempts to delineate a new role for themselves by shunning what they regard as the dubious motivations and effects of mass-production, many designers are shifting their focus from the object of production to its mechanics. In their re-examination of the machine, they are reconsidering its very nature and investing it with new qualities, giving us machines which are human, social or even funny. By

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Elizabeth Glickfeld

A User’s Guide to Oxymoronic Machines

concentrating on the mechanical workings of things, they also offer us a timely reminder that we will never be privy to the dance of electrons which go on inside a microchip. While fascinating conceptually, the critical effectiveness of these machines is up for debate. Frequently appear-ing on the design festival circuit and discussed on design blogs, often these machines have been created to perform or to be watched as much as they are there to do or to be productive. Have their designers retreated from the mass-production and consumption of goods only to become complicit in the production and consumption of images? Interspersed in the pages of this publication, the follow-ing User’s Guide to Oxymoronic Machines presents this new economy.

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494848 The Ramshackle Machine

The design critic Reyner Banham anointed the second decade of the twentieth century as the first Machine Age, one in which mechanisation infiltrated everyday life through the widespread availability of cars, telephones, typewriters and appliances. Enveloping products in the 1930s, the streamline design style quickly followed, for-malising assemblages of constituent parts into new objects and becoming a code for speed and modernity. This marked the beginning of deliberate obsolescence in com-modity aesthetics. The Ramshackle Machine, by contrast, such as Christoph Thetard’s r2b2 (2010) seeks to make all mechanical joints, hinges, bolts and screws visible. The kitchen appliance includes a hand blender, coffee grinder and food processor that fit onto a wooden unit containing a pedal-powered drive mechanism. The fly-wheel at the heart of the machine is left exposed which leaves no mystery as to its origins and ensures it is no fetish in the making.

A User's Guide to Oxymoronic Machines

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5150 51The Drawing Machine

A robotic arm hovers as it selects a coloured marker and then, in a sequence of frenetic movements along both a vertical and horizontal axis, it makes a line drawing. When it finishes, if the machine is so disposed, it is capable of erasing the whole composition. In this way, the affection-ately titled Rita – along with her two siblings Hektor and Viktor – have been stupefying audiences on the festival and gallery circuit for nearly a decade. The three draw-ing machines, the latter two which run on two motors and some cable, are the inventions of interactions designer and software developer Jürg Lehni. They operate in conjunc-tion with the software he created called Scriptographer. This is a scripting plug-in for existing drawing applica-tions which aims to empower the user by enabling him/her to create tools beyond the usual limits of the application. With these projects, Lehni tries to operate in the space between standardisation and human idiosyncrasy.

Closely related to the Writing Machine, Drawing Machines also have a long history in fine art. They have often been invented to question the origins of the creative act and the originality of the artwork. Past proponents of the Drawing Machine have included Jean Tinguely, whose mechanical devices were an ironic commentary on the notion of gestural abstraction as artistic expression. More recently, artists Damien Hirst and Oliafur Eliasson have contributed to the canon, the former involving the audi-ence in his artistic ministrations. Even if they admit the audience to the spectacle of the drawing process, it must be said that Drawing Machines cannot make the observer privy to the embodied or practical knowledge that holding the pencil itself produces.


In 1971 Richard Cork said, ‘Art, it is still felt, should always reflect the seriousness of its practitioners’ underly-ing intentions and any attempt to inject it with wit must surely lead to damaging accusations of frivolity. This is precisely the kind of criticism which Bruce McLean lays himself open to and yet he rides it willingly and with puckish delight.’ McLean has always been more inter-ested in what art could be, rather than what art should be. Within the intergenerational dialectic that played out between artists as well as critics in the 1960s and 70s, McLean’s art practice was uncommon for the way in which it harnessed humour. 1

Perennially committed to equal parts intellectual inquiry and comedy, McLean’s multi-decade oeuvre spans diverse media including sculpture, painting, photogra-phy, film and video projection as well as dance, writing,

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Failure is not a condemnation! … Failure is an accident: art has tripped on the rug… In my view, the accident is positive. Why? Because it reveals something impor-tant that we would not otherwise be able to perceive. In this respect, it is a profane miracle.

Paul Virilio, The Accident of Art

A Luxury of Failure: An Interview with Bruce McLean

Christina Manning Lebek1 Cork, R. (2003) Everything

Seemed Possible: Art in the 1970s, Yale University Press, pp. 2–34 and 36–38.

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the luxury of failure. We cannot fail. Most places you have to behave properly in order to not fail.’ Later in the public performance/rehearsal, time and again, McLean would interrupt saying, ‘Can we do this again? … Can we stop and do this again? … Hang on, that is crap can we do it again?’ This protean and repetitious ‘rehearsal’ of failure, in light of forty-plus years of success, caused me to ques-tion how failure informs McLean’s practice. I went to his studio and home in February and March 2012 to inter-view him regarding what he referred to as a ‘luxury.’ His overarching response was that failure, in all its nuances, is an artistic necessity. This seems poignant in the context of a cultural climate where funding for the arts is decreas-ing and fees for art courses are on the rise. Today, the potential consequences of failing seem especially acute.

For, after all, failure, as we commonly understand it, is infused with the inimical. The verb ‘to fail’ comes from the early French word ‘falir’ – ‘to be lacking, miss, not succeed’ invoking mental images of humiliation at the worst and redundancy at the least. The very fear of failure can be enough to inculcate the desire to avoid any path that might lead in its direction. Yet artists have long understood that failure (as impossible to consciously achieve as success) is useful in taking a project beyond preconceived ideas. Failure often enlarges the scope of what is possible, rather than the contrary.2 It was in this vein that McLean told me that the possibility to experi-ment and fail was the best part of the exhibition for him. While A CUT A SCRATCH A SCORE earned a four star review in The Times, McLean was not entirely convinced. He laughed when he said, ‘The thing we were trying to do wasn’t a success but it wasn’t altogether a failure either.’ For McLean, failure is more of an artistic

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2 Recent publications on this theme include: Feuvre, L.L. (2010) Failure, MIT Press and ‘Failure issue’, Cabinet Magazine, (7) (2002).

Christ ina Manning Lebek

architecture and performance. From McLean’s first exhibition in the group show When Attitudes Become Form, curated by Harald Szeeman at the Kunsthalle Bern, to his interview antics in 1969 with Gilbert and George at the Royal College of Art, to forming Nice Style, ‘the world’s first pose band’ with colleagues Paul Richards, Ron Carr, Garry Chitty and Robin Fletcher in 1971, McLean has demonstrated a desire to interrogate the establishment with his humour. For example, as a young artist in 1972, when he was offered an exhibition at the Tate Gallery, London, he chose to do a retrospective. Entitled King for a Day, it consisted of 1,000 typed propositions and catalogue entries for tongue-in-cheek works such as The Society for Making Art Deadly Serious, piece and There’s no business like the Art Business piece (sung). True to its name, the retrospective lasted for one day only.

I met Bruce McLean in November 2011 when I was writer in residence during the exhibition A CUT A SCRATCH A SCORE, at the Cooper Gallery, Dundee. His sense of humour was ubiquitous. Described as ‘a comic opera in three parts,’ A CUT A SCRATCH A SCORE was a collaboration between McLean, Sam Belinfante and David Barnett. It also featured the renowned mezzo-soprano Lore Lixenberg, performance artist Adeline Bourret, along with sixty musicians from three local choirs and the Dundee Drum Academy, as well as the city at large.

From the beginning, failure was a recurring theme of the salons that took place every afternoon through-out the exhibition. On the first day, curator Sophia Hao announced, ‘Remember Bruce, you have permission to fail.’ McLean publicly responded the next day at the second salon, ‘We have been invited here and we have

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Growing up, McLean developed a relationship between productive failure and humour. During his school years he did not do exams, ‘I wrote ‘shit’ all over them. I didn’t fail the exam. I just didn’t do the exam.’ His black humour seems hereditary, ‘My father was a very strange man. Big, tall man. When he left the house every day he used to say, “Goodbye Betty, Good bye Bruce. Oh I wonder who‘s gonna be second today?” And off he went. Somebody was going to be second and he thought he was it! ‘Number one!’ He was kind of joking but he sort of believed it really. He felt he was a failure, actually, because there was something he couldn’t do. One, he couldn’t stop them demolishing the Gorbals in Glasgow. He wanted to renovate the communities with modern sanitation etc. rather than see them destroyed but he failed and that really fucked him. He also failed at not dying. He used to say the only thing that’s killing me is the thought of dying and that’s killing me … He couldn’t stand it! So he ‘failed.’ I think he did in his terms but I don’t think he did actually, personally because I think he was quite funny about it …’

Though now McLean’s attitude is one of light-hearted risk-taking and experiment, I asked him if he was frightened by failure, particularly in the beginning of his career. ‘I suppose I never thought about actually fail-ing – what would that mean?’ Ironically this seems to be paramount to his success, which he maintains has never been his goal. I found that hard to believe, asking him to elaborate, he said, ‘No! You see, from the age of six I wanted to be an artist and from the age of nine I wanted to be a sculptor. And that’s what I am!’ I asked if he thought he had failed at any point along the way and McLean answered, ‘I don’t think I’m a failure, I think I got things wrong! (laughing) and you’re gonna get things wrong!’

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process than a lack of achievement. The risk of failure- as-judgment has been removed and the nuances of fail-ure’s uncertainty and unknowing have become useful in themselves. ‘I have to actually do something, in order to do something. If you asked me what I was doing before I did it, I could lie to you, but I couldn’t actually tell you unless I had actually done it. I made a 3 by 4 meter photograph today. What’s going to happen? I don’t know. I might throw it away. I’ll see tomorrow. – But it’s not that I’m just fiddling around. It’s only by a kind of play-ing, really, that you don’t lose out.’3 In the past McLean has said, ‘I continually find that the more you play, mess around and don’t take things seriously, the more you end up with something.’4

Perhaps this strategy accounts for why, as a young artist, McLean was invited to show in landmark exhibitions such as Op Losse Schoeven, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam in 1969 and The British Avant Garde, New York Cultural Center in 1970. At documenta 6 in 1977 McLean first performed a collaborative piece with William Furlong and Duncan Smith, titled In Terms of An Institutionalised Farce Sculpture and at documenta 7 in 1982 he exhibited a series of paintings titled Going for God.

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3 Manning Lebek, C. Interview with Bruce McLean, March 2012.

4 Wood, J. (2008) ‘Fallen Warriors and a sculpture in my soup: Bruce

McLean on Henry Moore’, Sculpture Journal, 17(2), pp. 116–124.

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people there for a week every night and nobody would be ashamed if it was great. The Arts Council have helped me in the past by giving me space, a bit of money, and time to try some things out, without having any pressure on me to succeed. It didn’t have to be a blockbuster show or a big success in commercial terms or even in public terms. And that is gone, to a large extent. I think it’s very sad for a lot of younger artists who haven’t got this luxury, because we had that luxury!’8

Dance was an area of experimentation for McLean. He was not interested in narrative, but rather dance as ‘simply body, shape, movement, light, space and form moving through space.’ An example of this is Un Danse Contemporaine performed at the Folkwang Museum, Essen in 1982 (first rehearsed at Riverside Studios in 1981) where McLean danced ‘in satire’ around a hat similar to one that Joseph Beuys would wear.9 His experience of this was telling, ‘I used to be a good dancer. Sometimes you can really do it and you’re like, Jesus! And sometimes it’s like you’re too drunk, or not drunk enough.’10 McLean described his surprise upon discovering that Fred Astaire, through practice and repetition, eliminated the possibility

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8 Manning Lebek, C. Interview with Bruce McLean, February 2012.

9 Wood, J. (2008) ‘Fallen warriors and a sculp-ture in my soup: Bruce McLean on Henry Moore’, Sculpture Journal, 17(2), pp. 116–124.


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He tells how a gallerist, when viewing one of his paintings, exclaimed, ‘“Bloody Hell! You’re onto something here. You know you ought to do more of these …” and I said, “You know I can’t just do more of these … it’s not just a case of doing more of these! Because they came out of some-thing which happened by mistake.”’ McLean explained, ‘Everything you do, everything I do, that is of any interest, is caused by an incidental incident which occurs …’5

Failure can be a form of persistent resistance to recuperation and commodification. By 1969 McLean had thrown most of his object-based work away into the River Thames calling them ‘float-away pieces’ such as Floataway Sculpture made in 1967.6 On one occasion, he drew the attention of the local river police when he flung sections of hardboard and large cubes of wood into the Thames from Barnes Bridge. They were cynical, initially, regard-ing McLean’s artistic alibi.7

Working in the 1970s, artists could expect gov-ernmental financial support more than they can today and this was formative for McLean. In the late 1970s and early 80s he developed work at Riverside Studios in Hammersmith at a time when, according to him, artistic success and failure were defined less in commercial terms and more by the creativity expended. ‘Well, I’ve been around for such a long time … in the past, there were situ-ations like Riverside Studios in the 70s, which was funded by the local council and the Arts Council … It was a huge area where a lot of American, German and Polish dance and theatre troops, among others, came and performed. Some things were worked out and some things weren’t, but there wasn’t the pressure on anybody at this time to make money from filling the place with people. You could put on a Shakespearean or a Chekhov play and have 10–25

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6 Wood, J. (2008) ‘Fallen warriors and a sculp-ture in my soup: Bruce McLean on Henry Moore’, Sculpture Journal, 17(2), pp. 116–124.

7 Gooding, M. (1990) Bruce McLean, Phaidon, p. 43.


in performing the sculpture of ‘striking a pose’ and looked to the style and theatrics of bands like the Bay City Rollers and T. Rex. They wore tuxedos as part of their attempts to mimic and mock the celebrity culture both in and out-side the art world. On other occasions they wore athletic padding while ‘training’ in gyms and sporting fields, parodying professional athletic teams. In 2012, McLean and fellow band members – Richards, Carr, Chitty and Fletcher, were the focus of the Institution Exhibition Nice Style: The World’s First Pose Band at The Henry Moore Institute, Leeds.

In 1971, Richard Cork said that McLean ‘realises that his ability to amuse is a very rare asset and since his energies are all directed towards questioning the priorities of other contemporary artists, it becomes a tool that suits his purposes.’ 12 In TATE etc., Andrew Wilson reiterated that argument claiming that McLean’s work ‘satirises the achievement of New Generation Sculptors’, which would include McLean’s former tutors Anthony Caro, William Tucker and Phillip King.13 Cork argued that McLean also parodied Henry Moore, their tutor and predecessor, such as when in 1969 he recreated Henry Moore’s Falling Warrior, by being photographed while throwing himself onto a plinth, located on the shore of the River Thames, titling it Fallen Warrior.14 Similarly, in 2011, Jo Applin argued that in the ‘photographically recorded perfor-mance, Poses for Plinth, in 1971 at Situations, McLean once again reconceived Moore’s humanist rendering of the body atop a plinth, this time destabilised and subject to inevitable failure.’ 15 These arguments, particularly in regard to the New Generation Sculptors, were possibly fueled by McLean himself who, in 1970, in regard to the

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14 Cork, R. (2003) Everything seemed possible: art in the 1970s, Yale University Press, p. 3.

15 Applin, J. (2011) ‘There’s a Sculpture on My Shoulder: Bruce McLean and the Anxiety of

Influence’, Anglo-America Exchange in Postwar Sculpture, 1945-1975. Getty Publications, p. 79.


of failure in his filmed dance routines: ‘I didn’t realise this, but he didn’t just go out and do it, he rehearsed and rehearsed and rehearsed. It was hundreds of takes in some of these films. I didn’t know that. It had to be absolutely like this, tailored to the cuff … I find that quite weird, I thought he’d just went and did it!’11

Asking McLean if he had any regrets, I was surprised to discover that he considered his return to painting and sculpture, after leaving Nice Style, a mistake. ‘I formed a pose-band, which was kind of a new group outside of art. Art is a three letter word, jazz is a four letter word … and Jazz is still outside ‘the thing’ …’ (Nice Style broke up in 1979) ‘So to answer your question about getting things wrong, I drifted back into making sculpture and painting again. I got seduced, you know? … I am always looking for something which challenges me, challenges what we think it could be, to make something which I can’t imag-ine what it is … I think I went wrong when I went back … I don’t regret it. I can’t regret it. But I think I went wrong. I don’t know what would have happened had I not, but I’d be quite curious to find out!’ Nice Style was interested

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11 Manning Lebek, C. Interview with Bruce McLean, February 2012

12 Cork, R. (2003) Everything seemed possible: art in the 1970s, Yale University Press, p. 36.

13 Wilson, A. (2011) ‘Andrew Wilson on Bruce McLean’s Nice Style’, Tate Etc, (22), 2, pp. 66–67.

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interview at St. Martin’s School of Art in 1963, ‘Frank Martin and Tony Caro said to me, “We are interested in Modern sculpture, in what it has been, what it is and what it can be. That is what this sculpture department is about. Are you interested in joining us?”’ McLean still remembers his reply, ‘Yes. You have told me what we will be doing. I am interested and I am coming!’ And from that point on, he wanted to ‘explore what was possible in regard to sculp-ture’. He continued, ‘Of course I went there to question sculpture but I also went to St. Martin’s because of the peo-ple who were teaching there, King, Caro, Tucker. If they set up the situation for you to question, then you have to ques-tion that … and question them and what they do as well. That’s not bad … I am very respectful of the people who have made me an artist – I only became an artist because of these people … But if you can’t have a bit of a laugh as well asking why Henry Moore’s Falling Warrior is always falling on the plinth? It’s a jokey kind of question, but through the joke – through the humor … sometimes something hap-pens which moves you onto something else.’ 17

McLean recalled another jokey art experiment that he had, with the late Joseph Beuys. ‘He was a kind of energy! If he walked in the room you got “something.”’

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17 Manning Lebek, C. Interview with Bruce McLean, March 2012.


Fallen W

arrior, 1969

16 McLean, B. (1981) ‘Not Even a Crimble Crumble’ Exhibition Catalogue Kunsthalle

Basel. Whitechapel Art Gallery and Stedeljik van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, pp. 22–23.

exhibition British Sculpture out of the Sixties, wrote: ‘Why don’t they take a few chances … smash up the little scenes they’ve carefully built up like a military operation for themselves over the last five years and have a go at setting towards making or doing something worthwhile?’ 16 It can be argued then that, in a sense, through his humor-ous iconoclasm and improvisation of their works, McLean identified failure in the work of his predecessors.

Perhaps McLean has been misunderstood or perhaps it is the softening of the years, but when I asked him for his response to these arguments, he suggests that his ongoing interrogation of art stems from a commitment he made at the very beginning of his career during his entrance

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Remembering with laughter, McLean continued, ‘I said to him once in London, “Will you give us one of your hats and sign it for an auction for us?” And he said, “Sure. Go and get one.” The shop was by St. James’s, so I got a taxi down there and said, “Oh good morning, I have come to buy a hat for Joseph Beuys.” I said, “He sent me down with a taxi to have one, he’s waiting for me to come now.” And because this is the age that it is, they said, “You mean Professor Joseph Beuys?” So I repeated myself, “Good Morning, could I buy a hat for Professor Joseph Beuys?” And a man went into a backroom … disappeared and came out with a polished wood tray with two brass handles on it and three hats: a dark grey, a light grey and a middle grey! So I said, “The middle grey one, please,” and they said, “The usual tan sir?” and I said, “No, the unusual one!” He gave me a hat, I paid for it, got in the taxi and I whisked back out of there. In the meantime he (Beuys) had bought six packs of butter. He slammed them onto the hat, cut a bit of the brim off and then gave it to me. I said, “Thank you very much!” We gave it to the auction and it was sold for a lot of money. He was a really good bloke! Such a funny day … Joseph Beuys’s hat …’ 18

Having said that, McLean had a bit of fun with one of Beuys’ famous projects, 7000 Oaks at documenta 7, Kassel in 1982. Beuys was driven by his theory of ‘social sculpture,’ which claimed that art in general and sculp-ture in particular could change society in profound and imminent ways. For the 7000 Oaks project, his (grandiose) intention was ‘… to go more and more outside, to be among the problems of nature and problems of human beings in their working places. This will be a regenerative activity; it will be a therapy for all of the problems we are standing before … I wished to go completely outside and to make

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18 McLean, B. Interview with Bruce McLean, February 2012.


a symbolic start for my enterprise of regenerating the life of humankind within the body of society and to prepare a positive future in this context.’19 Trading upon the envi-ronmentalist terms he asserted, ‘… that planting these oaks is necessary not only in biospheric terms, that is to say, in the context of matter and ecology, but in that it will raise ecological consciousness – raise it increasingly, in the course of the years to come, because we shall never stop planting.’20

Ever the jester, McLean responds with sardonic humour, ‘You know, Beuys planted these oak trees in the summer. Now everybody who knows anything knows that you don’t plant trees in the summer! (He makes the sign of the trees wilting to the ground in the summer heat.) It exposed him as not being completely truthful about being ecological and all those green things that he was on about. But it was kind of all right in a way. Maybe he didn’t have the technology or the knowledge (like he implied) but the spirit was there. The trees died! – This meant that the work didn’t fail. If he had just taken sev-eral trees and planted them at the right time, maybe we wouldn’t remember it!’ For McLean, failure creates a space to try things anew and something unexpected always emerges. The space creates a story and according to McLean, ‘The story is ‘the thing’. The reason that most people are artists is so that they can tell a story.’

McLean’s success, like that of Fred Astaire, is a product of repetitive rehearsals and attempts to perform again, rehearse again, dance again, paint again and make sculpture again. Imagined on a map, failure runs along the lines of latitude, which guarantee a continuum of crea-tivity. In failed attempts or creative death, there lies the redemption of an afterlife.

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21 Scholz, N. (1986) ‘Joseph Beuys – 7000 Oaks in Kassel’, Anthos (Switzerland), 3, p. 32.

20 Stütgen, J. (1982) Beschreibung eines Kunstwerks: Joseph Beuys, 7000 Eichen: ein Arbeitspapier der

Free International University, Düsseldorf: Free International University, p. 1.


6766 6766 The Solipsistic Machine

Exhibited at the seminal exhibition on technology and art curated by Jasia Reichardt at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London in 1968 entitled Cybernetic Serendipity, Richard Kriesche’s World Model was com-prised of two industrial robots alternately fulfilling identi-cal tasks. Each robot performed a series of movements culminating in the pressing of a button which sent the second robot into the same routine, and so it continued ad infinitum.

The purest form of oxymoron, the solipsistic machine is one which, in a display of egotistic self-absorp-tion, exists only to perpetuate itself. The idea has its most extreme incarnation in The Ultimate Machine. Also known as the Leave Me Alone Box, The Ultimate Machine functions only to turn itself off. A plain box with a switch on top, when flipped the lid opens and a hand or lever emerges in order to push the switch back in the other direction.

Ironically this exercise in the fundamentals of mass and energy was invented by the man who defined the third state of matter, that of information. Claude Shannon invented The Ultimate Machine as a gift for executives based on an idea of his colleague, Marvin Minsky, while working at Bell Labs in the usa in 1952. The transmis-sion of information is also responsible for The Ultimate Machine’s recent resurgence in popularity. Do-It-Yourself instructions for making one are rife on the internet. One video alone displays 46 different versions of the machine using everything from Lego, transparent perspex, suit-cases and cigarboxes.


6968 69The Living Machine

For her installation entitled The Immortal, Revital Cohen has connected a number of life-support machines in order to mimic a complete biological organism. The circuit of electronic medical machinery challenges entrenched oppositions between nature and culture and between the mechanical and the organic. While conventionally dia-metrically opposed, humans and machines have been elaborated in the other’s terms for centuries, the knowl-edge of one infusing the conception of the other. The internet, for instance, has often been compared to the workings of the central nervous system.

Cohen’s installation is also an eerie reminder of the-orist Paul Virilio’s prediction, made at the end of the last century, that after humans conquer physical and cosmic space, they will turn inwards to colonise the body. The reign of the computer will implode inside us. The emblem of this tendency is the pacemaker, which can change the fundamental rhythm of life. ‘Once this happens,’ Virilio asks, ‘how can we possibly assume that things will remain in working order?’ 1

1 Virilio, P. (1995) The Art of the Motor, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, p. 103.


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It was at a friend’s, a cold early morning, near where I was born and a long way from home. No one else was up; I went into the kitchen and examined the discs and tapes on the hi-fi. After a few false starts I found the right record, and a song played such that the room just gathered up and arranged itself into a single line, as best I can describe it. Three female voices converging, forgetting their hands hitting sticks and strings, recit- ing a melody like the vapour trail from a departed jet, just hanging. Without putting too fine a point on it the universe aligned on these notes, at least for a little while, there in the kitchen.

I thought about this. I knew that the chain of events that produced this record was, at least, complicated. To give a brief recap: a palmist predicts that a New Hampshire woman’s future granddaughters will form a pop group;

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$xP(x) ∧ ¬$x, y(P(x) ∧ P(y) ∧ (x≠y))

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73New Hampshire woman’s son pulls said granddaughters out of school to fulfil the prediction; granddaughters press a record; vinyl dealer makes off with the money and 900 of the 1000 copies. (And over time, record finds an unexpected fan base, is rereleased, distributed, celebrated.)

It’s also a story of family, happiness and otherwise, which deserves many more words than I give it here. But what I was thinking about was circulation, and the way this record came into existence, in a quarantine way, and initially for an audience of just 1, the father. The original recorded objects were, almost by definition, a vanity pro-ject – and this ‘vanity’ is the dad’s, not the girls’ – so then the fact that the music is also completely astonishing is maybe just another twist in the tale.

After the theft there were 100 copies of the record left. But if your audience is only 1, this is still 99 copies too many. What would be the archetypal edition of 1? Self-published family histories were suggested to me; the sin-gular documents of obscure ancestry that turn up second hand every once in a while. But for an audience of 1, this is still more copies than strictly necessary. And self-pub-lishing, of course, is not what this is about – nothing vain about seizing the means of production – it’s a question of the limits of circulation, or the perfect meeting of sup-ply and demand, in a one-to-one ratio.

Much nearer home, on platform 1 of my local railway sta-tion, is an art space. In its reading room, coincidentally, they are currently operating a project called Edition of 1. Its creator, an artist, has handed generative control over

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over a piece of craftsmanship when it would never reach more than a few people, replied: ‘A few is enough for me; so is one; and so is none.’

Letter writing parallels Edition of 1 in this one-to-one ratio; we could hope that, in future, books and artworks will be even more like correspondence, and there will be as many of them as there are people to produce them. But then the anonymous advice has that punch line; an audience of none would also be just fine.1

What of the sounds in the kitchen? The girls singing, their three voices in 1, like another piece of advice from Seneca via Democritus, ‘To me, a single man is a crowd, and a crowd is a single man.’ A crowd is an audience of 1 is a crowd, and intimacy is nothing personal. Seneca ends his letter – written to a friend in the early years of the a.d. era – with an ‘I’ and a ‘you’ borrowed from else-where. He says:

‘I am writing this,’ he says ‘not for the eyes of the many, but for yours alone: for each of us is audience enough for the other.’

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1 There are theories of art, informed by psychoa-nalysis, that take this seriously too: that art is, at base, a process of self-understanding, the artist as their own spectator, stuck in some kind of onanist feedback loop.

David Morris

to an online algorithm that composes an on-the-spot, 1-off jpeg artwork on demand, to be printed, if you like, and taken home. On screen I received a granular sports team against an expanse of green pitch but the printer would not cooperate and then my train arrived.

There is a long tradition of artist publications in edi-tions of 1. A quick look at the ‘Unique Works’ section of an artists’ book dealer reveals signed napkins, found paper, cut-off tees, coloured-in colouring books, rewrit-ten photo albums, self-defacements, diptychs, triptychs, one-time Xeroxes, lunchboxes, letters, maps, scores, con-crete poems on plastic apples, drawings, boxes, mirrors, mountains, prototype multiples, mail art receptacles, reconstructed burials, performance residues, taxidermy interventions, receipts, and more.

Already, the category is out of control. What comes across most strongly from Edition of 1 is the invitation, given the availability of mechanisms like this, to be intimate. In a recent interview conducted inside online virtual world Second Life, Sergei Murasaki (Chris Marker’s online sl identity) reflects, ‘To be able to make a whole film … with my own ten fingers, without any external support or intervention … and to then go sell the dvds I’d burned myself at the Saint-Blaise market … I confess, I felt tri-umphant.’ Make what you can, make it good, and circu-late, as intimately as possible. In one of Seneca’s letters he shares someone else’s advice about this:

… Equally good is the answer given by the person, whoever it was (his identity is uncertain), who when asked what was the object of all the trouble he took

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7776 7776 The Object Machine

In The Human Condition (1958), post-war philosopher Hannah Arendt queried the status of the machine as a means for producing an end. She argued that since we have come to design products whose shape is primarily determined by the capacity of the machine, the machine must henceforth be considered the end to which all things are adapted.

Object Machines similarly challenge the essence of their own instrumentality and use by functioning simultaneously as a means and an end. They are both a thing and a production process. In 2006, Atelier nl created Sleeping Beauty, a lamp that knits its own lamp-shade when it is turned on. Process and product coincide as the light generates power for the knitting to occur. Elsewhere, the back-and-forth movement of a rocking chair provides the kinetic energy to power an attached oled lamp in designer Rochus Jacob’s Murakami Chair.


7978 79The Writing Machine

In ancient times, so sacred was the task of writing the Bible that scribes were required to say each word whilst writing it and wash their bodies before materialising the word of God. The document became invalid if there were any errors or if two letters touched. In 2007, German collective Robotlab delegated the responsibility of writ-ing the Bible to a robotic arm retired from a car factory. Mounted with a nib, the Bible-scriber known as the Bios studiously pours over a roll of paper, methodically repro-ducing every word of the Bible in a fifteenth-century typeface. Giving the impression of human embodiment, it performs for anyone who wants to watch. The history of the alphabet is one in which the curve of a letter or angle of a serif contains the residue of a past means of inscription, whether of a metal plate, a chisel or a calli-graphic nib. The presence of the tool itself, however, is usually a guarantee of the human relationship to the document. This is not the case with the Bios. It merely simulates the trace of the human hand. In its grip then, the pen no longer testifies to the presence of a human being or offers a promise of authenticity.


Delirium is the opposite of lucidity. The delirious mind is said to be ‘disordered…resulting from disturbances in the functions of the brain…incoherent…frenzied… restless…maniacal.’ It is not a loss of the mind, a loss of the ‘functions of the brain,’ but a passing lack of control, a temporary repositioning of what constitutes the absurd and the banal. Surely such moments of the car-nivalesque are inherent to creation? The painter Jean Dubuffet, the unwitting augur of Red Bull, believed such madness ‘gives [man] wings and helps him to attain visions.’ Laudanum addict Thomas De Quincey vaunts the ‘knotty problems,’ ‘enigmatical entries,’ and ‘sphinxes riddles’ presented by ‘eloquent opium,’ in his vivid Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821). Even the children’s programme Sesame Street parodies the ‘mad painter’ amid flights of fancy: heavy-lidded, mute, and

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Leaking the Squalls

If in these moments I write, useless, it is never more than a resumé. Still, alas, it is my lucid optimum.

Henri Michaux, Ecuador: A Travel Journal, 10th May, 1928

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as rent from the ether, may be meaningful by default, but gathers meaning in that departure. Nonsensical worlds may be constructed in a nonsensical script of encyclopaedic detail, as in Luigi Serafini’s Codex Seraphinianus (1981); calligraphic lines can bleed and steep across the page, as in CoBrA founder Christian Dotremont’s ‘logogrammes’; the sigilizations of chaos magic will depict the magician’s desired outcomes, as in Victorian artist Austin Osman Spare’s programmatic glyphs. Indeed, meaning is infinitely malleable as marks move with runic significance. Yet, in every case, nonsense depends on an assumption of sense.

By no means the most exemplary example, but certainly the most sardonically complex, to unassum-ingly dislocate the creative and the critical acts, to expose language as ‘nothing and everything,’ is French poet and painter Henri Michaux (1899–1984). He sought to ‘decondition’ himself from language, leaking the squalls of his frantic pen across multiplying ‘illegible’ tracts. The first of these idiosyncratic marks were made through-out the 1920s, preceding the flowering of French existen-tialism, as seen in works such as Alphabet and Narration. Incapable of being read, but decipherable, these marks are signs, influenced by the Surrealist’s experiments at the time in automatic writing. Inked curlicues and fuddled lines recall those found in ancient ideogrammatic parch-ments or inscribed across tomb walls. This ‘new lan-guage,’ however, is entirely his own. These taches d’encres (ink blots) have none of the fluid lyricism of his later watercolours; they are terse scratches eked across a page in which he apes the lacquered sweeps of Japanese char-acters, the figurations of Egyptian hieroglyphics, and the doodlings of psychosis. His ‘signs’ even adhere to all of

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shaggy, he paints and repaints numbers on any surface he can spatter, from bald heads to clinic walls.

And yet can such delirium ever exhibit criticality? How may such maniacal meanderings be purposed, tooled to any kind of aim? Between aesthetic epiphany, drug-hazed transcendentalism, and the frenzied machinations of the creative mind, it is one thing to experience delir-ium, another entirely for it to be represented. It is at this point, at the observable breakdown in Art of signification and sense, that mimetic depiction becomes an accusation of largesse as opposed to a creative anxiety. How to realise disorder, without seeming false? How to realise disorder, without seeming deliberate? How to realise disorder, and be deliberate?

Asemic writing inhabits the peripheries of such schol-arly concerns. Emanating from Surrealist experiments in automatic writing in the 1920s, it is often dispar-aged as a nebulous phenomenological endeavour, in its expressive attempt to reflect immediate experience; the errant tics of disengaged minds. Having no specific semantic content it adheres to the behaviours of lan-guage, and yet does not deliver recognisable meaning. This quite clearly serves, as often observed, as a critique on language itself as a fallacious system of meaning. As a mode predisposed to imparting gathered ‘truths,’ what happens when it falls away slack-jawed and reeling at the perversity of the utilitarian objective? Something much more caustic, and much more rigorous. The American writer, Lynne Tillman, notes with chiastic exactitude that, ‘Out of nothing comes language and out of language comes nothing and everything,’ ending her most recent book Someday This Will be Funny. Language,

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the conventions of language; arranged in lines across the page, left to right, and interspersed by paragraph breaks.

The signs themselves, however, remain elusive. The ideogram is a sign expressive of an idea, imagistic rather than instrumental of the sound of the word it represents. In this sense, it makes a return to that creationary impulse to depict, not only maintaining a fidelity to the look, but also the ‘feel’ of the object in question. In so far as this collapses mark and lexis, Michaux himself discerned a distinction in his work between the quality of expression in drawing and the quality of expression in writing:

The drawings are quite new in me, especially these, in the very process of being born, in the state of innocence, of surprise; but the words, the words came afterwards, afterwards, always afterwards…and so many others. How could they set me free? On the contrary, it is through having freed me from words, those tenacious partners, that the drawings are frisky and almost joyous, that their movements come buoy-antly to me even in exasperation. And so I see in them a new language, spurning the verbal, and so I see them as liberators.

Mouvements, 1950–1

He envisages a point of ‘relief,’ a ‘disencrustation’ of expres-sion, in which one will be able to ‘express himself far from words, words,’ flaking away that gathered roughcast of ‘the words of others.’ Those ‘tenacious partners,’ can only terrorise in their inert fixity and wail with all prior usage, whereas the generative ‘innocence’ of the line is born every moment pen touches paper. In spite of the overblown rhet-oric of aesthetic communion surrounding Michaux, it does at his more fluid points seem apt. Where language compro-mises spontaneous correspondence with feeling, drawing

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for him is comprised of that very possibility. Where lan-guage is rendered impotent – ‘hygenic’ – in its inevitable delay, unable to ever truly convey experience, the mark, the line, the stroke can be performed to the moment.

¤

In this sense, Michaux’s drawings could be considered as his most critical act. He needs no operative, underpinned system through which to communicate, as he imagines an expanded field of meaning composed at the point between ideogram, hieroglyph, line, and character. Then, it is also his most delirious act. His drawings are manifes-tations of this attempt to ‘liberate’ expression; records of moments of movement in meaning. The unidentifiable character is invested with intent, put to an esoteric use. Thus it is not meaning that is left out in Michaux, but a solid ground of referent.

This reaches its most obvious apotheosis in his now infamous Mescaline Drawings of the late 1950s. Following his first experiments with Indian ink, the ‘blots’ of which he found ‘abhorrent’ and ‘really only blots, which tell me nothing,’ he needed to push beyond this material quibble to

show the inner phrase, the wordless phrase, the sinu-ous strand that unwinds indefinitely and is intimately present in each inner and outer event. I wanted to draw the consciousness of existing and the flow of time. As one takes one’s pulse.

‘Vitesse et Tempo’ Quandrum III, 1957

Drug-use was used as a critical exigent, a self-induced derangement intended to interrogate the limits of

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molecular abrasions – the universe ground down to its particles. Michaux even conceives of the drug as a sepa-rate performative entity: ‘Linked with space and forms, it [mescaline] draws by repetition and symmetry (symme-try by symmetry).’

Converse to expectation, mescaline is of greater purpose when conferred through language: ‘Linked with words, it writes by enumerating.’ Where the pictures repeat in bland admonishment, the writing enumerates – it separates and specifies, refracting the multiplying visions under the drug. The assumed freedom is reversed. Therefore, language is not the impotent coda it once seemed, repeating known clichés, but spools away in metaphoric brilliance and hysteric clauses. The drawings may be more visually direct, but the writings of Misérable Miracle (1956), L’Infini Turbulent (1957), Paix dans les Brisements (1959), Connaissance par les gouffres (1961) and Les Grandes Epreuves de L’Esprit (1966) are fantastical writ-ten reflections on his mescaline experiences, achieving something closer to the explosive hallucinations of colour, light, and sound. Here, he divines, as opposed to merely channelling, the drug that:

makes everything different, unrecognisable, insane, that causes everything to overshoot itself and flash by, that cannot be followed, that must be followed, where thoughts and feelings now proceed like pro-jectiles, where inner images as much accentuated as accelerated, bore and drill with violent, unbearable insistence, objects of an inner vision from which it is no longer possible to detach oneself, luminous like burning magnesium, agitated by a to-and-fro move-ment like the slide of a machine tool, infinitesimal, and which vibrate, shudder and zig-zag, caught up in an incessant Brownian movement, images where the

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expression. One may speculate endlessly as to what impels the use of drugs: whether it is to discover untold ‘paradises’ as envisioned by Baudelaire; to mechanise the ‘mental kitchen’ with a ‘labour-saving device’ as related by Benzedrine-user W.H. Auden; or whether it is sim-ply to get high, to ‘systematically derange’ the senses, in Rimbaud’s phrase. All, however, are an age-old phenom-enal attempt to attain greater knowledge, whether or not that knowledge may be put to use.

Thus, in a brusque monochrome, these small draw-ings, produced either under the influence or during the fading of its effects, try to relate all the uncontrol-lable tremblings and torrid apparitions of a mescaline trip, teeming with zig-zags, loops, furrows, pinnacles, fissures, maniacal lines, and even letters, landscapes, eyes, and faces. And yet, that is all there is to it. Ironically, in the effort to expose the untrammelled depths of what he called ‘l’espace du dedans’ (that Ballardian inner space; the space within) these drawings in their obsessions actually betray the nervy hold the drug induces on move-ment. Where his marks and swathes of ink were seen as a ‘new language,’ used as ‘liberators,’ they now all follow a neurotic schema; scratches overlap one another again and again in agitated lines, waves do not swell and fall but are tersely scrawled in viral vacillations, frittered cellular pat-terns follow some tight symmetrical authority. Michaux was aware of this; ‘Mescaline upsets the composition’ he states in Misérable Miracle, ‘it develops idiotically, it is very basic, defective and senile.’ This ‘awful, convulsive experience’ threw off his ‘tempo’ and whilst the drug pro-duced visions ‘marked by streaming, sparkling, extreme seething,’ his hand is stultified by its ‘rapid abstract’ grip. The drawings do not evoke apparitions, but timorous

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1 ‘To hold a pen is to be at war.’

2 H.W. Longfellow, ‘The Broken Oar’ (1878)

¤

The beatific reverie, recapitulated throughout the history of aesthetic theory as the sublime apex of apprehension, is also one of the most elusive. Hounded by the philosophis-ing connoisseur, it itself becomes of little use. Although ‘use’ is never the point – the festishized sublimation to the work assumes an instinctual understanding, beyond academic doggerel – it is a cliché, which contemporary art critics have attempted to reinvigorate through various devices. Historian T. J. Clark’s ‘experiment’ in art criti-cism, The Sight of Death, records his intensifying daily observations of the same two paintings; highly literary art critics, such as Dave Hickey and Peter Schjeldahl, rhap-sodize in loose-limbed, poetic essays; art-writing journals affect a ‘magpie politics’ of amassed, but disparate, titbits. In relinquishing oneself to the onslaught of theory, phi-losophy, politics, and purpose, ‘disturbances in the func-tion of the brain’ are inevitable, if not necessary. In the incapacity for linearity or inevitability, a prismatic ‘out-sider’ criticism becomes the only enlightened response, formed by what Michaux was to figure as divided ‘epiphe-nomena.’ Meaning is elided; fictive devices are used, col-lage is expected, responses are lyrically disjointed. What are we left with? All this plumage? Is all critical practice to a certain extent ‘asemic,’ only understood in all its con-structive complexities by the author?

‘Qui plume a, guerre a.’1 François-Marie Arouet bestowed the pen with a rare militancy. Bemoaned throughout the history of literature for its both its cogent might, as in Cervantes’ quill as ‘the tongue of the mind,’ to its cruel impotency, as in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s flung ‘useless pen,’2 Arouet’s immortalisation of the

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straight lines invested with an upward momentum are naturally vertical, cathedral lines, that have no upper limit but go on mounting indefinitely, where the broken lines in a continual seism crack, divide, crumble and shred, where the curved lines get lost in extravagant loops, twists, and twirls, infinitely intricate lacework patternings, where objects seem set in tiny, dazzling troughs of boiling iron…

To Draw the Flow of Time, 1957

The critical capacity of language here is stretched, with all the causal snap of elastic. There is no static repetition, but a generative anaphora and a violent grammar. As dis-tanced from the tightening limpid loops of intoxication, Michaux recalls with urgency. Lacking the hyperbolic pretensions to immediacy and relating experience proper, language is able to play in the disconnect, using that fractious distance from the experience as illustrative of the fractious experience itself.

And yet, delirium is surely all about the discon-nects. This is not delirious criticism, it is a critical reflec-tion on delirium. Such poetic afterthoughts can never be more than bit-part summaries, as Michaux himself recognises, a critical ‘resumé’ of an experience. What of colour? What of sound? The form may be fractured, but it logically follows function, and comprehensively repre-sents the surge of trippy turns. The above extract is highly tooled; Michaux’s furtive wit is deployed in every syntac-tic and lexical convulsion. He may be ‘frenzied… rest-less… maniacal’ but he is not ‘incoherent.’ In fact he is at his most sublimely coherent, and perhaps this is the prob-lem. Delirium in criticism cannot suppose a directive, can never suppose a use, it is too bewildered and beleaguered. It is the ecstatic to which the critic turns.

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entire working life, in painting, prose and poetry, and were the first figurative and colour-saturated pieces to be produced after his pared ‘signs’ of the1920s. The charac-ters, usually anonymous, all fall loosely into one of three categories; the clown, the magician, or the onlooker. All comment on the twisted reality that surrounds them; swollen heads loom out of crumbling walls, unknown fevers produce hellish flotillas of rotting animals, fires rage yet cannot even burn ‘the strand of a cobweb.’ They, however, are immobilised. They are capable only of averting their eyes, the eyes that ‘remain great requisi-tion blanks of terror.’ It is the figure of Monsieur Plume, Michaux’s tractable clown, that is the most enigmatic, and the most horrifying. Forced to participate in nightmares to which he has little or no connection, the clown is never fully realised, except as a helpless Charlie Chaplinesque caricature. He seems to emerge from nothingness into the horror of blame and blood, to then coolly oblige ‘Bien, bien’ (‘Alright, alright’) to those who cruelly abuse him. The Plume tableaux are marked by the sole refrain ‘Plume s’excusa aussitôt’ (Plume apologised immediately). His wife is even carved into numerous pieces, a fact he plainly acknowledges, and turns back to sleep.

The asemic is exhibited in the character. Abstracted to a dithering dumbrel, Plume makes no meaning of the world, and contributes no meaning to the world. He is a daub in a plane of action. But ‘je plongerai’ (‘I dive’). That enigmatic final motion in Michaux’s poem Clown (1938) harks Monsieur Plume’s one decisive moment, in the par-adox of losing himself ever further. Already ‘Lost in a far-off place (or perhaps not), without name, without iden-tity,’ he desires final oblivion. This is a liberating nullity however; only by being ‘et ras…/ et risable’ (and blank…/

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pen here resonates beyond that quivering nib scratch-ing out his letter to Marie-Louise Denis, on 22nd of May, 1752. Is this a war waged against or on behalf of the author? The pen may be a loaded gun, but one must put it to use. Criticality was born of his pen. As a prominent Enlightenment polemicist and poet, this wasn’t the only ‘plume’ with which Arouet was to do battle. Better known by his illustrious nom de plume, or pen-name, Voltaire, he also fought against his own identity, most frequently adopting this anagram of his Latinate forebear AROVET LI, as well as 177 other assumed names. La plume, particu-larly in the French intellectual imagination, thus often takes on a mystical quality. As both sturdy ‘pen’ and deli-cate ‘feather,’ it is an evasive strategy in nom de plume, as commonly envisioned in ‘plumes of smoke,’ or puffed-up as the ornamental ‘plumage’ of the peacock. The phrase voler dans les plumes à quelq’un literally means ‘to fly at somebody,’ in the sense of a riotous attack. La Plume was also a Parisian literary and artistic review, set up in 1889 by Léon Deschamps, featuring impressionist motions of Maurice Denis, Toulouse-Lautrec, Gauguin, Pisarro, Signac, Seurat and Redon. The plume is seductive – toy-ing with the capacity for power and play. What issues can be madness or divinity, passion or reason, tenacity or tolerance. What may be puff of smoke, may also be an attack. Thus la plume becomes mercurial; braced between decision and occlusion.

And it is again Henri Michaux to use the plume with critical temerity. It is within his poetic work that the bite of the critiquing character is most achingly realised, in his ill-at-use figure of Monsieur Plume. By no means without precedent but doubtless the most acerbically realised, Michaux’s peculiar fools recur throughout his

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It was easy to revive the dead in the eighteenth century: just insert a tobacco resuscitator into the rectum and deliver a quick puff of smoke. The body would be stimu-lated back to life.

The kit comprised a bellows – originally a pig’s bladder – a tobacco pipe, a mouthpiece, and a cone for insertion. The technique gained popularity in 1746, when a drowned woman was resuscitated courtesy of a rolled piece of paper and a sailor’s pipe; a success story that saw ‘The Institution for Affording Immediate Relief to Persons Apparently Dead from Drowning’ install the kits at various points along the Thames, and build a centre by the Serpentine in Hyde Park to rescue drowned skaters.

Doubts about the credibility of tobacco-smoke enemas led to the phrase ‘blowing smoke up your arse’, no doubt after experiments, including a mass resuscitation

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and laughable…), may he ‘open’ himself to that ‘new and unbelievable dew’ of promise. This scrubbed nihilism plays out again and again; Plume never takes the plunge. For all its abstraction, this is the most cruelly critical, but most subtly figured ploy Michaux devises. Plume’s ambivalence to the horrors he witnesses renders him both morally culpable and morally absent, as it obscures both Michaux’s authority and guile. There is delirium in the device; the ping-pong flatness of this character’s world stupefies our sympathies. The difficult demands difficulty. Just as it dawns on Madame Realism, in Lynne Tillman’s similarly supine tract, Madame Realism: A Fairy Tale (1988), or as it was ‘impressed upon her’; all ‘explana-tions were as complex as what they are meant to explain.’ And surely that is the difficulty in ambiguity; it is all rela-tive. Laughable in the dark.

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Flick back: ‘And get the detachable extension pole too. No ladders – no splatters! And wait! We’re so confident that you’ll like this that we’ll double your pads for free!’ I go onto the Amazon website. Customers gave the prod-uct a blanket one star, except for a suspicious two who gave it five.

The tobacco resuscitator was administered in good faith; both the physician and the patient believed the product worked. But it is fairly obvious that the EasyTone shoes are not going to make you thinner, that the Whizz Mop and Paint Pad Pro are no faster, and no superior, to average mops and paint-rollers. So why, with the resources and knowledge available to us, do we continue to buy them?

Buckminster Fuller asked this question back in 1947 when he set up fictional company Obnoxico, to criti-cise those who make money selling worthless objects. The outlet was a faux mail order catalogue, and the star prod-uct was a gold cast of a baby’s last worn nappy; a memento of the moment a child is toilet trained, in object form. ‘Somehow or other the theoretical Obnoxico concept has now, twenty-five years later, become a burgeoning real-ity,’ Fuller reflected in the 1970s. ‘As the banking system pleads for more savings-account deposits (so that they can loan your money out to others at interest plus costs) the Obnoxico industry bleeds off an ever greater percentage of all the perennial savings as they are sentimentally or jokingly spent for acrylic toilet seats with dollar bills cast in the transparent plastic material.’

We live in a world filled with Obnoxico products, accompanied by a marketing industry highly skilled at mass manipulation. In 2004, two Czech film students cre-ated a supermarket, Czech Dream (Ceský Sen), in a Prague

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effort in a Paris morgue, failed. Yet the object was stand-ard medical practice across Europe and America for over a century, not just for resuscitation, but for treaing consti-pation, strangulated hernias and intestinal obstructions.

A surviving example of the tobacco-smoke enema sits in a display case at London’s Wellcome Collection. This is the accompanying description: ‘There are no known accounts that the Tobacco Resuscitator worked.’ The label may be short but it has a subtext that says: ‘Look how foolish they were. We know better.’

But do we? Just down the road from the museum, British model Kelly Brook’s derrière is the focus point of a billboard. She is wearing Reebok’s EasyTone trainers, a type of shoe that supposedly tones the buttocks 28 per cent more than regular shoes when you walk in them. The shoes are Reebok’s most successful new product in five years. Even when the Federal Trade Commission forced Reebok to rein in its claims, the shoes continued to sell.

This puzzle later plays in my head when I am flick-ing through tv channels and land on Pitch tv. Celebrity builder Tommy Walsh is demonstrating the Paint Pad Pro, a painting tool with ‘the speed of a roller and pre-cision of a brush.’ The paint glides over the patterned wallpaper, giving instant coverage: ‘It uses less paint than a brush, with minimum effort!’ I stare at my grubby walls.

Next channel: A woman delicately throws vinegar, oil, eggs, orange juice and a can of tomatoes onto a tiled floor. She picks up Whizz Mop, and moves it over the puddle. ‘Look at that! All gone and no streaks! And what do we do now?’ The male presenter smiles at the pretty assistant. ‘Whizz!’ she says, and places the Whizz Mop into a bucket, pumping a pedal to give the mop-head a spin dry.

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field. They employed a leading marketing agency to produce TV and radio ads, distribute 200,000 pamphlets and build a website, all boasting products at unbeatable prices. The project was filmed, and culminated in the opening of the building. The students, masquerading as businessmen, cut a ribbon, triggering 3,000 people, laden with shopping baskets, to run towards the hypermarket, only to reach a canvas façade supported by plinths. Their faces slowly turn to anguish as they realise they have been duped. The entire project was a fiction.

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But marketing is not enough in itself to keep us buy-ing Obnoxico products. Often, products with a dubious use-value have another, less obvious function that keeps them in the market. The useless tobacco resuscitator became useful for something else: to ritualise – in a rather unfortunate manner – the end of a life. The process gave a purpose to the doctor who arrived to pronounce a man dead, and set the grievers on their path, knowing that ‘we did everything we could.’ For the survivors, the shock of the events quite possibly caused a psychological and


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4bodily effect that aided recovery. Similarly, people who buy Reebok’s EasyTone shoes do so because they feel they are investing in their wellbeing, and this improves their state of mind. They may notice an improvement to their derrière even if there isn’t one.

This is called the placebo effect and has been defined by psychiatrists as ‘any therapy prescribed … for its therapeutic effect on a symptom or disease, but which is actually ineffective or not specifically effective for the symptom or disorder being treated.’ In medicine, our belief in a pill’s ability to work sends a message to the pituitary gland to release its own endogenous phar-maceutics. The effect causes many red faces: when the pharmaceutical industry’s new wonder drugs are tested against sugar pills, half fail to beat the placebo. The same has been found for medical procedures. When physician Edzard Ernst performed an electrocardiogram diagnos-tic procedure on one of his elderly patients, the patient responded: ‘That was great. I feel much better, my chest pain has completely gone.’ Placebos are so effective, there’s a regular debate between government parties, doctors and psychologists as to whether they should be available on the nhs.

That unquestionable faith we once had in God, nature and even witchcraft to make us better is today transferred to science and technology. Functionless things, pills and procedures can improve our wellbeing simply through our belief in them. And they can easily be designed. That thermostat in your office probably has its wires cut, and is connected to nothing but your imagination. Turn the dial up and you’ll feel warmer; Wall Street bosses admitted that this act saved them a for-tune. The ‘close door’ button in the elevator only works

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The minders had to learn the function of the objects by living with them, but more often that not, they invented a function to suit their own means. A man trialling the GPS Table checked it every night, finding reassurance from the proof that gps satellites were orbiting as usual and so all was well with the world. This is the inversion of what Dunne & Raby call Hollywood blockbuster design; design that promises us perfect lives and happy endings. Here, we have design that allows people to be who they really are: fragile, messy personalities.

Placebos – Latin for ‘I will please’ – work to vari-ous means; but as often as the intentions of duping us are good, they can as easily be driven by unsavoury goals. There is also the placebo’s evil twin to contend with: the nocebo, meaning ‘I will harm’. Voodoo curses that lead to death have been explained as extreme nocebo reactions.

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Dunne and

Raby, G

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Table, 2001when the engineer plugs his key in; some say it exists to give us the illusion of control. Have you noticed how if you hit it repeatedly it seems to work?

So if the effects are good, is it right to deceive peo-ple, and wrong to tell people the truth? Perhaps some-times, but because we don’t always know which things are and are not placebos, we can’t critique them. They are an irreversible equation, switching instantly from useful to useless once we know. We can’t decide at which point we need to know we are being duped – because then it’s too late. So should we allow people to orchestrate these elabo-rate spectacles in our mind?

The complexities of designing placebos are explored by ‘critical designers’ Tony Dunne and Fiona Raby, in the duo’s Placebo series. Each of the conceptual products does something, but that function is extremely nebulous. Among the range of objects is a table with a gps receiver embedded in its surface, and a chair enhanced with a pair of electromagnetic-sensitive vibrating nipples. They were given to members of the public to take home, with no instructions for use and no product specification.

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More recently, an autopsy of a man who died of terminal cancer revealed that his tumour was not large enough to cause death. Was it, the doctor suggested, the expectation of death that killed him?

Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid, two pio-neers of Moscow conceptual art, warn of the sinister side of placebos. They devised Super Products for Super People: a series of fictional objects presented as if they were in an American shopping catalogue. The objects guarantee to provide their user with an enhanced sense of self-impor-tance. Olo is a tongue ring adorned with a pearl ‘language ornament.’ The idea is that it helps ensure nothing but positive words are issued from the mouths of its users, implying that people in the Soviet Union need to be careful of what they say. It also pokes fun at the capitalist marketing system that makes us believe in the power of these objects, making them seductive to us. Staring out of the picture with a steady gaze, chin raised and an air of self-importance, the Olo model makes for an uncomfortable self-reflection.

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103102 103102 The Social Machine

Whether or not automation has been of benefit to the human race or has made it redundant is still a matter for debate. Today, a new generation of designers is recon-sidering the machine’s goal of economy and efficiency. Austrian duo Mischer-Traxler’s Collective Works (2011) is a basket-weaving machine which will only work in the presence of a human being. Four coloured mark-ers attached to the corners of the contraption document the number of people in its company. The machine only functions when sensors in its frame detect an audience. When watched, a spool of wood veneer begins to unwind through glue before coiling back on itself to form a basket. Progressively darker hues are introduced as additional onlookers approach so that each basket becomes a colour-coded record of its own creation. To date, only eight baskets have been made.


105104 105 The Destructive Machine

Like the inventor of the atomic bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Swiss artist Jean Tinguely learned the hard way that unfettered technological curiosity is not of its own merit constructive and that the realisation of the best- made plans are not always within human control. On March 17th 1960 in the garden of the Museum of Modern Art, for his Homage to New York, Tinguely orchestrated his junk assemblage of bicycle wheels, piano keys, a roll of paper and a weather balloon, which he designed to destroy itself. Alas, the machine did not self-destruct as it was intended to. Tinguely misattached a belt, everything went dangerously wrong and the fire department was called.

Today, physicists and engineers are hard at work three hundred feet under the outskirts of Geneva on the particle accelerator known as the Large Hadron Collider. By accelerating protons to fantastically high speeds, these scientists hope the resulting collisions will provide the energy to unearth the origin of mass, crack Einstein’s famous formula and find a fourth dimension beyond width, length and depth. The down side is that some believe they may also produce a black hole, which could devour Switzerland and the rest of the planet with it.


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1953, discussion in the House of Commons on whether or not to introduce commercial television to Britain formed a lively debate. Athletic at times.

.fletche: Anyone who has had experience of American television knows that it is almost impossible to control it, and that it can pollute the domestic atmosphere of every home, pervert the minds of the children –

.o-ewing: rose –

.fletche: Unless we are very careful com-mercial television will pervert and reduce the standards of taste, morality and culture in this country for a generation.

.o-ewing: Nonsense.

A Damned Nuisance

Charmian Griffin

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109108 that commercial television was an import akin to ‘smallpox, bubonic plague and the Black Death.’3

The nation’s viewing should be left, surely, to the honourable and measured supervision of the c. Still –

the Impotent Television Authority, the Inadequate, Irrelevant, Impossible Television Authority4

had its advocates, and, as the hysteria subsided, wise words were whispered in support of a little monkey business;

Let us, I beg, prefer the long competitive spoon with the devil to the milk and water handouts of this episcopal clinic. […] commercial television is dangerous. But if you have followed me, is it more dangerous – can anything be more dangerous – than the progressive diminishment and elimination of vitality itself?5

Quite. A canonical criticism of the English and their ‘obstinate clinging to everything that is out of date and a nuisance’ came from George Orwell some time previous.6

There is bathwater, and there are babies, and com-mercial television’s opponents seemed to be throw-ing out more than simply one mischievous primate.

3 Lord Reith, House of Lords Sittings, 240:223–334, 9 May 1962

Insults respectively from Mr William Warbey, MP for Broxtowe, Warbey again, then Mr. Edward Shackleton,

MP for Preston, South, and finally An Hon. Member, repeated by Shackleton, all during House of Commons

Debates, 527:203–329, 4 May 1954

‘J. Fred Muggs [the chimpanzee in question] isn’t an accident. He is the fairground inevitable.

He is, of course, you and me and all of us with our pants down.’ Grierson, J. (1954) ‘The B. B. C. and

All That’, The Quarterly of Film Radio and Television, 9(1), pp. 46–59

Orwell, G. (1968) ‘The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius’, in: S. Orwell and I. Angus

(eds), The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell. Volume 2: My Country Right or Left

(1940-1943), London: Secker & Warburg

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.gaons: The Government adhere to their policy that the c monopoly in television shall no longer be allowed to continue. Under certain safe-guards and certain conditions an element of com-petition by television based on advertising revenue shall be permitted.

.ayhew: Shame.

.gaons: All the same I believe that a little competition would not do the c any harm, any more than competition does harm to any organisation or to any individual. I hope myself that the time will not be too far distant when this new and interesting development of television will be in operation.

sevealhonoualeees: rose – 1

Arguments and uprisings continued for and against the c monopoly; freedom of choice; the benefits of competition to the economy. A few months later, nc televised the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. The c had previously broadcast the event live to British viewers with the care of those walking down a marble corridor the length of a football pitch – backwards – bowing. The American commercial channel cut the ceremonious footage with an interview with a chimp –

a chimp!

What cheek. Proof that a British equivalent would have our royals depicted as gin-soaked tax squander-ers, spreading Communism all over the country;2

House of Commons Debates, 510:2166–78, 5 February 1953

‘Then in the interval we might have had somebody saying, “They have all gone for refreshment now. They

are only being kept alive until the end of the performance by drinking Nicholson’s gin.”’ Mr. Emrys Hughes MP for

South Ayrshire, House of Commons Debates, 527:2298–436, 20 May 1954

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A Damned Nuisance

111110 So, once it was certain moneylenders, fortunetellers, and those associated with anything as vital as pro-miscuous sex, or death, would not be advertising,7

the Independent Television Authority scraped the grade8

and commenced transmission from a tower on Beulah Hill.9

A battle was won, but triumph was tempered. The Croydon Tower, nowhere near Croydon, survived six months of transmission before the Crystal Palace Tower – which really was very near, and very tall, and Very High Frequency – began to broadcast the c signal previously sent out from Alexandra Palace.10

Viewers could continue to tune into the ita chan-nel should they please, but the c picture played straight over the top of it.

We now had wonderful pictures on the BBC and everything else was swamped. We didn’t even need an aerial; the sets would work on a bit of wet string.

‘The Principles lists some products and services that may not be advertised at all, including moneylend-ers (as distinguished from legitimate banking enterprises), matrimonial

agencies, fortune tellers, undertakers or others associated with death and burial, betting tip services, unlicensed employment agencies, contracep-tives, smoking cures,

and alcoholism cures.’ Paulu, B. (1956) ‘Britain’s Independent Television Authority (Part II)’, The Quarterly of Film Radio and Television, 11(1), pp. 55–69.

Television Bill: votes 296 in favour, 269 against, House

of Commons Debates, 525:1553, 25 March 1954

9 The date had appar-ently been set by the Conservative party to coincide with the beginning of their campaign for reelection. They had

wanted to use the station as part of their stance against Labour. In the end, election dates were amended and the Tories never were able

to use the slogan, ‘Don’t let them take your other knob away!’ Described by Wernick, R. (1955) ‘Jingles for Britain’, LIFE, 39(14)

10 22nd September 1955–28nd March 1956. Hill, J. (1996)

Radio! Radio! Devon: Sunrise Press, p. 185

7

Charmian Griff in

8

The BBC TV sound would come through on everything – hearing aids, car radios, record players and all our amplifiers.

Gerald Wells lived a mile from either tower, still does, always has. He was tasked firstly in ’55 with converting his neighbourhood’s television sets to receive the new ita transmission, and then, the year after, with excavating it from beneath the c’s. They were back to haunt him. The converted and retuned sets were those that had inspired Gerry’s assistant Graham to coin a new colloquialism nailing the particular physiological changes his boss went through when provoked or anxious. June 1953, the most important opera-tion in television thus far, Gerry sold ‘everything capable of showing a picture’ to ‘half of south east London.’ The cheap erratic television sets had been offered with a year’s guarantee and he spent the big day itself driving around in a van, fixing, and Coronating.

Rewind a few decades and Gerry’s parents’ home was being wired for mains electricity just in time for his birth. Should they have had a televisor, he could have watched the very first public British moving image television transmissions.11

Aged two weeks, he would have seen the president of the Television Society silently mouth a two-minute oration,

11 30-line disc mechanical televisions, or televi-sors, were first publicly exhibited and sold in the United Kingdom at Radiolympia 1928 by the Baird Television Development Company. For £20 people could buy Model A, which could display a picture through

a valve receiver. Model B could do sound and image for a more hefty fee of £90, and Model C, all the above, a little better, and encased in mahogany for £150. The monthly journal Television issued several hundred sub-licences to their readers to construct their own televisions

under Baird’s patented directions too. These were the sets in operation the following year when the first public broad-casts began, on weekdays from 11–11:30 am from 30th September. Information from Hill, J. (1996) pp. 60–61.

A Damned Nuisance

113112C

rystal Palace Tow

er, 19 April 201

115114 then heard the same speech relayed via the wireless set afterwards.

Pragmatic from the outset, he waited for the deliv-ery of synchronised signals before tuning in.

Wired up to the mains when in utero, born twinned with television, and raised on radio, the young Mr Wells could almost not help but be utterly struck with electricity. Of course, love that is not madness is not love, and things did get a bit crazy.

As soon as I could move around, as soon as I was mobile, nothing was safe. Light switches, anything.

Pillaging was at first restricted to his home.

Then Chamberlain declared by radio broadcast that the country was at war with Germany.

Splendid opportunities for acquiring new parts were presented by the wartime evacuation and widening landscape of bombed properties; beneath a trap door in the garden shed there grew a collec-tion of stolen switches, fuse boxes, wireless sets and electrical scraps.

I was being a damned nuisance, nicking anything I could, pulling the light fittings and radios out of bombed houses and being a pain in the neck.

Radio sets, amongst other possessions, were being stored in the house next door, for friends who had lost their homes. Light fingers began to relocate each one over the fence, until sharp eyes next-door-but-one spotted the routine, more vaudeville than villain. Nonetheless, Gerry showed no sign of relenting and was summoned eventually to Lambeth Juvenile Court.

Charmian Griff in

Next stop, Stamford House Remand Home,

then the psychiatrist’s office,

home on probation,

back in court,

probation,

Gypsy Hill Police Station,

Stamford House again

and then finally, the end of the line,

Liverpool Farm Reformatory School.

As it turns out, Gerry’s experiences there were in no way reformative. The story is a long one, and he tells it best. He gets plenty of practice too, for his home is now The British Vintage Wireless and

A Damned Nuisance

117116

Television Museum; the collection even includes a number of the devices Gerry acquired in his delin-quent days. As for visitors, it is not open to the public, but people can enquire about appointments,

If they can string a sentence together, then we’ll let them in. If they’re not going to drive me barmy, we’ll pull out all the stops. Tea on the hour every hour, bis-cuits, sweets and whatever you like.

The goods are served in the front room, surrounded by wall to wall analogue televisions that date to the dawn of this medium, now in its sunset moment. Gerry can turn all the televisions on from a single switch, each delivering a picture and sound in its own time. Memories jostle for space with radio-grams, valves and gramophones. This was the house where Gerry first heard music on the wireless set, the house from which he watched The Crystal Palace burn, where he fell in love. It is the place where, when he was working on wireless sets in the garden shed,

he heard his mother announcing the impending death of his father over the PA system.

Charmian Griff in

By the time you read this, the c will have ended their analogue tv transmissions from Crystal Palace. c 2 will disappear on the 4th April 2012 and the remaining channels on the 18th. The Croydon Tower lost the war, its television broad-casts silenced back in the eighties. Gerry will have outlived all the signals

and squabbles,

his lifetime spanning the breadth of British ana-logue television history. His sets will be silenced, and Gerry certainly won’t be tuning into a digital broadcast. But, luckily, he always preferred radio:

the pictures are better.12

A Damned Nuisance

12 All quotes and biographi-cal details: Gerald Wells, personal interview, 3 February 2012 or Wells, G.

(2002) Obsession: A Life in Wireless, London: British Vintage Television & Wireless Museum

119118118 The Erotic Machine

Marcel Duchamp represented the erotic relationship between men and women using analogies drawn from physics and engineering in The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even (1915–23). Executing the work on two panes of glass with materials such as lead foil and fuse wire he represented the sexual encounter as a mechanical process.

In the 2011 music video for Elektrotechnique, Dutch multimedia artists Lernert and Sander present a series of animated pastel-coloured tableaus comprised of domestic objects. Two suitcases support a pedal system of red stilettos on a mattress; a record player powered by a kettle is mounted with a stick that protrudes and rotates through the bottom of a plastic chair; a cham-pagne bottle strapped to a vibrating exercise machine suggestively wobbles; and an office chair swivels round and round wrapping itself with an extension cord conjuring sado-masochistic associations. As the song progresses to the pounding of an electric drum beat each tableau reaches a climax: an umbrella springs open, an inflated rubber glove bursts, a white box oozes efflu-vium and a plastic bag deflates.

119


121120 121The Chain-Reaction Machine

Also known as the What-Happens-Next Machine or the Heath Robinson, the Chain-Reaction Machine involves a series of everyday objects organised in sequence, each behaving according to their ‘natural’ tendencies. Once started, each object triggers another, forming a chain of events. Sometimes chain reaction machines are a convo-luted means of achieving a simple task; other times they have no purpose at all. Nevertheless, their recent appear-ance in popular culture, on YouTube, in television com-mercials and in contemporary design festivals makes their appeal worthy of consideration.

The chain reaction turns the machine into an event or narrative and more often endures in film rather than in concrete reality. Typified by Peter Fischli and David Weiss’s seminal 1987 film, The Way Things Go, in which everyday analogue objects such as tyres, chairs, bottles and ladders fulfil their gravity-dictated destinies, often to comic effect, in a seamless sequence orchestrated by the artists, the gesture was imitated in a Honda commercial of 2003 without any sense of its forerunner’s precarity. Dutch outfit heyheyhey recently created and filmed their own chain reaction machine called Melvin in a warehouse on the outskirts of Eindhoven. The ringing of an alarm clock triggers a chain of events involving bal-loons, umbrellas, toy-parachutes, a trail of fire and the spilling of paint. The film ends propelling a video camera upwards on a seesaw, the view of which is shown as the final shot of the film, focusing on the camera crew which has been constructing the illusion of a seamless sequence. In its harnessing of everyday objects, the Chain-Reaction Machine can be seen as an existential inquiry gone bur-lesque. It enacts a sense of destiny counteracted by the possibility of numerous diversions from it. The forces of nature although binding, are also not reliable and the Chain-Reaction Machine presents this existential conun-drum in the spirit of play.


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Some objects exist in pairs. One thing requires another like a lock and a key, a plughole and a plug or a screw lid and a jar. Through the connection of one component with its matching opposite other, they temporarily become a whole and functional object. If separated, the function of at least one element becomes obsolete and while one might use a jar without its lid, what is to become of a lock without its key? A similar functional pairing can be found in a buttonhole and a button, connecting one part of a garment with another; the ability to separate and connect. If a garment has a button but no buttonhole, the former becomes a pure aesthetic detail taken out of its original, purposeful context. In such a case the presence of a button no longer hints at the presence of its match-ing other and in reverse the presence of a buttonhole no longer suggests the necessity of a button.

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Dora Mentzel

Apousiokoumpounophobia

by

Interestingly, on and outside of Savile Row, tailors weave their own interpretations into tales concerned with the original purpose of a small sartorial detail. Stories naturally vary and some uses have been forgot-ten entirely. While heritage is of the highest value, it has been adapted into a subjective and distinctive execution that is unique to each tailor’s design.

The ability to industrially mass-produce gar-ments meant that suits became affordable for the wider population. Without the time-consuming and expen-sive measuring and re-measuring of a customer’s body, the total duration of producing a suit is reduced from around thirty-three working hours to just under an hour in the factory. Instead of purchasing a bespoke suit, which might take a tailor around two months and the customer several trips to the tailor’s shop, the ready-to-wear shopper can find a suit in one visit. Needless to say that both price and quality are abridged and the bespoke suit remains a covetable item, not least because of its perfect tailored fit. Because most bod-ies are not symmetrical and not one body is the same as another, the industrial production of suits means that body proportions are standardised and estimated according to a general mean. As a result, the so-called pitch of a suit – the natural and unique position of someone’s arm in relation to the torso and the transla-tion of that into a jacket sleeve – is aligned to the indi-vidual and therefore ensures an accurate fit of a suit’s jacket. The near obsolete buttonhole – after all, in the rare event of wearing a decorative flower, it can be pinned to the lapel – ended up being sewn up,

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Dora Mentzel

One such example is the buttonhole on the left- hand side of the lapel of a men’s formal jacket. Having its origin in the buttoned-up military coat, the lapel on contemporary and traditional men’s suit jacket sprung into being out of the habit of wearing one’s uniform half-open, a style appropriated and made widely fashion-able by the dandy godfather Beau Brummel in the first decades of the nineteenth century. With both sides of the top half of the jacket flapping to either side, the way a men’s coat folds, meant that the left side was show-ing the buttonhole, while the other covered the button. The style of wearing one’s jacket in such a manner soon meant that they were produced with a lapel intended to show the jacket’s previous inside. The covered button became obsolete and was removed but the buttonhole remained. Through the re-functioning of the buttonhole from its original purpose into an entirely new function, its purpose morphed into providing a place for securely holding a decorative flower on a men’s suit jacket. The stem of the flower could be threaded through the hole to hide the stem on the underside of the lapel. Some tailors added another component to the button-hole; the addition of a flower loop on the underside of the lapel to ensure the secure position of the flower. According to Eithen Sweet from Maurice Sedwell at No. 19 Savile Row some Edwardian suit jackets saw a fur-ther, additional feature under the flower loop into which a miniature vase could be placed, thus ensuring that the flower stayed fresh throughout the entire course of a lengthy engagement. Two components, tightly related, have been separated. While one of them became obso-lete, the other morphed into a new function.

124


to trick you into believing that the button, as the most vulnerable detail of a garment, might have to be replaced at some point. I would argue that in most cases it is the spare button, somewhere forgotten in the back of one’s drawer, that outlives the garment.

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Dora Mentzel

blinded and muted. The detail remains, if only to nod to tradition.

Similarly, while the possibility to open the cuffs of a suit jacket is not essential, ready-to-wear suits omitted the production of functioning buttons. Those in favour of high quality bespoke or made-to-measure suits have taken to leaving the first button on the cuff open, thus distinguishing themselves from consumers of fast fashion. Yet sartorial critic Francis Brown noted this habit of subtle display in public as ‘the height of vulgarity’ and an ‘abominable practice’. On some suits only two of the cuff buttons are working while the others are a sham. Some ready-to-wear labels have caught on to this display of apparent expensive taste and now produce suit jackets with working cuff buttons.

When Bernard Rudofsky asked Are Clothes Modern in his 1947 anthropological critique of clothes, he illustrated the number of buttons a man would typically wear from head to toe, from coat to under-pants. With a total of seventy or more buttons1 – most of them useless – he suggests that formal dress is archaic.

Buttons are also vulnerable. They break, become lose, have their thread hanging off, drop to the ground, get lost, are replaced with an atonal surrogate or collected.

Fast fashion generously gives out a spare but-ton with every item of clothing, as if to remind you or

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1 Drawers: 2, trousers: 16, shirt: 8, vest: 6, coat: 17, overcoat: 19,

gloves: 2; from Bernard Rudofsky, Are Clothes Modern?: An essay on

Contemporary Apparel, (1947) Chicago: Paul Theobald, p. 120


129128128 The Embodied Machine

The conventional narrative of the relationship between human and machine is that tools like the spoon and spear were invented to assist the body. Later, machines were invented to first alleviate and then eliminate labour all together. The figure of the cyborg appeared in science fiction to show how mechanical and electronic systems could be designed to extend human functions. The reversal of the conventional subject-object relationship between human and machine is made real with interac-tions designer, Choy Ka Fai’s Prospectus for a Future Body (2011) which involves the use of an external digital appa-ratus to invest human beings, particularly dancers, with muscle memory. The implement choreographs the body rather than vice versa, or so it seems.

Elsewhere, Joong Han Lee’s Haptic Intelligentsia is a human 3d printing machine which attempts to reunite computer design technology with the sense of touch. An extruding gun attached to a haptic interface nudges and guides human hands in the making of a pre-designed object such as a bowl.

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There is a monument to my childhood at the end of Kensington High Street. Frequent family excursions were spent inside the captivating building where I would be engrossed in the cultures of the Commonwealth through diverse displays, from Canadian snowmobiles to

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aim: ‘To create a building of the most modern design, which is beautiful in itself, in harmony with its woodland setting and functionally efficient.’1

Its crowning glory was a warped roof that created dramatic spatial effects for the visitor. The ceiling presses down at the entrance and, as the visitor travels up onto the central platform, the space suddenly explodes into an open expanse. Clever structural engineering freed the interior of any need for supports. But for all

133

its architectural verve, critics at the time of the building’s opening were less than happy. Disappointed by what he viewed to be shortcuts in the roof ’s structural design, one critic commented: ‘It has created a lid over the exhibition space, rather than a more three-dimensional enclosure.’2

1 ‘New Commonwealth Institute Building’, Ministry of Education Press Release, 17 June 1959

2 ‘Commonwealth Institute’, Architect’s Journal Information Library, (Nov 14 1962), pp. 1119–26

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Zimbabwean agricultural products. Yet for the last decade, the former Commonwealth Institute has been an empty, festering shell. When a building loses a clear purpose, its existence hangs in the balance. Despite the former Commonwealth Institute’s Grade II listing – awarded in 1988 in recognition of its celebrated hyperbolic paraboloid roof and unique interior – the wrecking ball has seemed, for a long time, to be its inevitable fate. Recently, however, alternative uses have been imagined for this icon of post-war architecture and the building is set to become the new home of London’s Design Museum. Constructed with one purpose in mind, and now about to serve another, the revival of this building raises questions about preservation and reuse. Our historic monuments and redundant industrial structures are often reanimated. What challenges befall the new residents of this icon of modernist architecture?

Opened by h Queen Elizabeth ii in November 1962, the Commonwealth Institute was the first new public building to be constructed in the capital since the Royal Festival Hall on the South Bank ten years earlier. The Ministry of Education selected architects Robert Matthew Johnson-Marshall (j) to design a building to house engaging exhibition displays about the Commonwealth countries. The architects more than matched the original

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born from his annoyance with inaccessible museum layouts. Lord Cunliffe, then just Roger, a recent gradu-ate of the Architectural Association, recalls Johnson-Marshall saying: ‘The awful thing about museums is that if you want to see something in gallery F, you have to walk through A, B, C, D, E to get there. I want people to be able to come in and make a direct choice.’4 The main exhibition space was divided into three tiers allowing the exhibits to be viewed and accessed from multiple points.

Despite its open form the design was just not flex-ible enough to deal with change. As the Commonwealth of Nations expanded, the physical, aesthetic and ideo-logical demands on the building made it increasingly hard to represent the growth of member states that reached fifty-four by the mid 1990s. With a leaking roof and outmoded displays, the Commonwealth Institute lost the affection of its own trustees. In 2002, it closed its doors for good.

Like its predecessor the Imperial Institute, based in South Kensington, which was decreed obsolete in 1956 and bulldozed to pave the way for Imperial College, some thought the Commonwealth Institute was worth more as rubble. These enemies made dubious claims that the building was outdated and beyond saving. One major factor stood in their way, the Grade ii listing. But even this was no bar to progress: Culture Minister Tessa Jowell and Foreign Minister Margaret Beckett backed this brash proposal and drafted a parliamentary bill to de-list the building.

Luckily, the public protested, and English Heritage spoke out reminding ministers of the building’s cultural significance, and the bill was dropped. Instead a com-promise was met and the building was sold off to master

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4 Lord Roger Cunliffe interview, 7 February 2012 [by telephone]

Freire Barnes

Others attacked the acid colour of the glass façade that contrasted with its park surroundings outside and the lack of natural light within. Yet most of these quibbles were counterbalanced by praise for the interior: ‘All these points of criticism would hardly need to be discussed in such detail, were it not for the immense and obvious success of the main interior.’3 Designed for a footfall of 450 school children a day, Chief Exhibition Designer James Gardner – famed for his work on the Festival of Britain in 1951 – put the dioramas and interactive exhibits at the eye level of a 15-year-old visitor.

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j broke with architectural conformity in creating this non-hierarchical space. One of the team, Stirrat Johnson-Marshall, the Ministry of Education’s then go-to architect envisaged a new type of exhibition building

3 ‘Commonwealth Institute’, Architect’s Journal Information Library, (Nov 14 1962), pp. 1119–26


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building the ‘biggest gift’, as Pawson describes the roof, will come into view, framed by the rectilinear form of the central staircase. The floor space will be increased to around 10,000 sq metres, providing the Design Museum with three times as much space.

Pawson ardently explains that one of the highlights of the space is the view out onto Holland Park, achieved by adapting the previously opaque façade to give more transparency. Not only will this enable a visual assimila-tion between inside and outside, but more dramatically, it will illuminate the once dark and disorientating space. Pawson tells me his loss of orientation in the former space was, ‘quite disconcerting, for me it’s like having a blind-fold and being spun round.’

Kensington High Street will be the third home of this peripatetic institution. Founded in 1989 by Terence Conran, the Design Museum’s roots lie in the Boilerhouse, a temporary exhibition space in the Victoria and Albert Museum’s basement where the institution’s first director, Stephen Bayley tried out his ideas. Today, the institution is led by Deyan Sudjic, one of Britain’s prominent architectural critics, and so someone well placed to manage the move from Shad Thames to Kensington High Street.

So what should be kept and what should be changed? How much modification can be achieved in the restoration? Sudjic ruminates on the difficulties that arise in transforming a monument to 1960s architecture:

Philosophically, the difficulty is that almost all thinking about conservation comes from William Morris, and the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings. […] Morris wanted the new to respect the

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developer Stuart Lipton of Chelsfield Partners who rebranded the building The Parabola. After a few years of deliberation on its possible future use, with the proposi-tion of a Casino at one point, a decision was reached that seemed the best fit.

An emblem of post-war London, the building will become the new home of the Design Museum in 2014. This is an institution which specialises in making its home in unlikely spaces. Having outgrown its riverside residence – a former banana factory – at Shad Thames, the Museum proposes to become ‘the world’s lead-ing museum of design and architecture’ with ‘a greatly expanded education and public events programme’5 in the former Commonwealth Institute. Fifty years after the building’s inauguration, architect John Pawson’s designs for the new museum were recently unveiled. Press reports of the commission abound with optimism. Pawson can do for the Design Museum what Herzog & de Meuron did for Tate Modern and contemporary art.

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Pawson’s design retains an emphasis on the expansive interior space and the dynamic roof. Upon entering the

5 ‘£80 M Plans unveiled to create World’s leading Design Museum in London’, Design Museum Press Release, 24 January 2012

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Rhodesian copper; window frames were made with Canadian aluminium; and the art gallery’s flooring was Malaysian rubber. Pawson proposes using his ‘signature’ materials, marble and concrete. Sudjic explains: ‘We felt Pawson’s aesthetic approach would not compete with the very strong character of the building, but could gently bring it back to life.’

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8 Planning documenta-tion of PP/11/03333 and PP/09/00839 [accessed via www.rbkc.gov.uk]

Freire Barnes

Some parts of the building will be recycled. The marble flooring on the Commonwealth Institute’s central dais, a remnant from the Imperial Institute, will now become a wall decoration in the new Design Museum. In this way, the Design Museum will be embracing its state as a renovation. But how sympathetic to the original and ecologically conscious should we be when repurposing buildings? The venerable modernist, Cunliffe, highlights the environmental benefits of rescuing such buildings: ‘I think in these sustainable days, it is better to reuse exist-ing structures that have a lot of embodied energy than

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old by not pretending to look old. That’s great but it is not much help for the 1960s, when buildings were made of wood wool, plastic and glass, not stone.6

Pawson shrugs off my questions about the restrictions that come with remodelling an icon of modernism: ‘For me everything is architecture whether it’s a fork, or a building. Whether it’s working inside an existing build-ing or doing a building from scratch, there are always restrictions, and we always investigate the site and for us the site happens to be inside the skin of a sixties build-ing.’7 Pawson had to work closely with English Heritage, and adhere to the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea’s planning requirements, an obligation that didn’t deter the architect who’s adept at working within envi-ronments of historic significance. His formidable knowl-edge embraces the ‘repair and upgrade’ requirements that, for this building, include: sufficiently securing the character and historic significance of the main exhibi-tion building and roof, renovating the façade where the ancillary building is being removed, and ensuring good internal light conditions.8 It is apparent that Pawson is in his element, focusing his minimalist eye on the smaller details. The balustrades and handrails, he tells me, have pleased the powers that be.

If Pawson’s fascination with architecture is any-thing to go by, j’s design will be given its due: ‘I am slightly obsessed by wanting to understand why an architect put up what he did.’ This fascination does not, however, extend to the original relationship of the build-ing to its materials. The fabric of the former Institute symbolised the Commonwealth by utilising gifts from the inaugural nations: the roof was made from Northern

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6 Deyan Sudjic interview, 2 March 2012 [via email]

7 John Pawson and Chris Masson interview, 9 March 2012 [in person]


flexible enough to be permanently safe from the wrecking ball, so future generations can see it house new activities, if the Design Museum ever leaves.

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to rip it all down, build it with new materials, using up more energy.’9 For Sudjic, it is the form of the building which offers value. Keeping it, he says, ‘presented a better financial opportunity, but there was also the added ben-efit of rescuing a building from the 1960s of considerable historic and architectural interest.’

As Cunliffe admits, architects rarely consider the future use of the buildings they design: ‘The Commonwealth Institute was designed because we thought that use would go on forever. It was not designed as an adaptable building that is why it has been such a problem.’10 But should architects involved in renovation also take the long view? Pawson’s answer to this ques-tion takes the form of a modernist rationalisation: ‘we try to provide a rational kind of solution to architecture.’ But should he be interested in what will happen when, at some future date, the Design Museum outlives this space? Perhaps this is a premature question today but as Denise Scott Brown asks:

How ‘functional’ is it to plan for the first users (for the client’s program or brief) and not give thought to how it may adapt to generations of users in the foreseeable future? We should consider widening our definition of function beyond Le Corbusier’s and Goldfinger’s architectural equivalents of time-and-motion studies.11

Through radical approaches, developer and client have managed to overcome the significant constraints which marred the building for years, enabling it with a new pur-pose. They have successfully recycled this piece of mod-ernist heritage, and given it a function beyond its original intention. My hope is that this striking building is now

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9 Lord Roger Cunliffe interview, 7 February 2012 [by telephone]

10 ibid

11 Denise Scott Brown, ‘The Redefinition of Functionalism’ in Architecture as signs and systems: For a

Mannerist Time, ed. Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, Harvard University Press, 2004, p. 142


1 Nicholas Carr, ‘Is Google making us stupid?’, The Atlantic, July/August 2008, www.theatlantic.com/magazine/toc/2008/07

2 Friedrich Kittler in Nicholas Carr, ‘Is Google making us stupid?’, The Atlantic, July/August 2008, www.theatlantic.com/magazine/toc/2008/07

Towards the end of his life the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche learnt to touch-type, with his eyes closed, on a Malling-Hansen Writing Ball typewriter. He mastered this tactical technique in order to alleviate the debilitat-ing headaches that had begun to strip him of the ability to write with pen and paper. This triumph of technologi-cal intervention saw that words could once again, ‘flow from his mind to the page’ 1 – yet with a style, remarked many, that was noticeably different to his work of previ-ous years. The switch from pen to machine, as Friedrich Kittler explained, meant that prose ‘changed from argu-ments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style.’ 2 The staccato click and clack of the Writing Ball had rallied the senses. As each word punched its imprint onto the page, it stamped the air with a train of short, sharp sounds that lingered, like hooks, onto which deliberation could hang. Letter-by-letter this method of

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Nicola Churchward

Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

Nicholas Carr

Some may argue that we’re just living another accel-eration of history, but this is not the car replacing the carriage … this is about the brain, it’s a cognitive revolution.

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6 Eli Pariser, ‘Beware Online Filter Bubbles’, Ted Talk, posted May 2011

www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_bubbles.html

formulae. Yet the company’s mission, ‘to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful’ is still facilitated through so-called junk-food algorithms. They work by feeding us what they think we would like to view, according to our previous, individual and collective, search activity. As Eli Pariser puts it, ‘the internet has quickly encased us in personalisation bubbles, where increasingly the only people and ideas we encounter are the ones we already know.’ 6 Instead of helping us to expand our understanding of the world, Google is reinforcing existing knowledge and potentially collapsing possibilities.

Google’s method of searching therefore directs the path of the jet-skier, so that he or she may zip across the surface, but in ever-decreasing circles. For the users who would like to expand their knowledge field and learn about the periphery of their topic, this algorithm is of lim-ited value. In terms of our contemplation and modes of expression mirroring the qualities of an intellectual tool, this potential collapse of possibility might extend beyond creating a situation in which there is an inability to reach information we want or need. It may well lead to a decline in our ability to appreciate and anticipate breadth and expanse, in terms of knowledge horizons and scope for research. Yet the business of examining the sociocultural repercussions of intellectual technology is something that can happen only in the wake of its supposed glory. Any alterations to the way that we think as a result of techno-tools are regarded as nuances to be dealt with when their existence is made manifest and declared to be detrimental to progress, or to health. So what are the prospects for a culture that regurgitates its knowledge bank to the point of congealment? Steven Levy, author of In the Plex: How

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3 Christian Emden, Nietzsche on Language, Consciousness, and the Body, University of Illinois Press, 2005, p. 28

4 Nicholas Carr, ‘Is Google making us stupid?’, The Atlantic, July/August 2008, www.theatlantic.com/magazine/toc/2008/07

5 ibid.

composition revealed itself to be an integral part of the process by which Nietzsche arrived at, and articulated his thoughts. As Christian Emden explains, the phi-losopher’s ‘interest in rhetoric and his experience of the typewriter framed his understanding of language in a highly symbolic way: the traditions of the philosophy of language versus the scientific and technological condi-tions of knowledge.’ 3

The idea that our contemplation and modes of expression might reflect the qualities of the tools that assist us in composing thought is provocative, consider-ing our increasing reliance on intellectual technologies. In 2008, Nicholas Carr, writing for The Atlantic maga-zine, explained that the externalising and extending of our mental capabilities has been tinkering with human cognition for centuries. With recourse to Nietzsche’s typewriter, the widespread use of the mechanical clock and the efficient choreographing of factory workers in the industrial age, he asked the question: Is Google making us stupid? 4 It has long been asserted that the Internet has the effect of lowering its users’ concentration spans as they become increasingly accustomed to the ‘fast-read’. Carr described his own diminished capability for ‘strolling through long stretches of prose’ 5, due to a reading man-ner that seemed to be mimicking the fleeting flashes of abounding internet articles, available to be sifted through in their many dozens per day. ‘Technoculture’ is a word yet to be recognised by spell-check software – yet our reli-ance on intellectual technology continues to increase and Carr’s question is more pertinent than ever. Over the past four years, Google – the great go-to navigator of global knowledge – has been busy refining its working meth-ods, making over two hundred additions to its search

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Machines and Metaphors

and creative language. For example, if we were to enter the word ‘love’ into this search engine the qualities and characteristics of love, as expressed in language through-out the web, would be collated to create a meta-data set. A search then takes place for constructs with similar structural attributes to ‘love’, yet that belong to entirely different domains. ‘Love’ according to YossarianLives! is a ‘river’ – and it is true that love ebbs and flows, it is ever changing and has a source, it’s difficult to control. In being able to detect and read the way that we describe life, within the information of the web, this search engine has free reign to make metaphor. It tells us that love is also sleep, rioting is a new dawn, music is confession, art is food, art is a funeral, freedom is a goodbye, the end is a photograph, the end is a wedding, law is a wheel, poise is reinvestment – the possibilities seem to be endless.

Not only does YossarianLives! recognise the poten-tial for metaphoricity in language, it has the capability of seeking out related constructs on a scale that no human mind could ever attempt. So how and where could this capability be used? In a pitch to Seed Camp executives last year, Neeley and Foster-Smith asked their audience to imagine that a designer, who had been asked to envis-age the medical emergency department of the future, was searching the Internet for inspiration. Enter ‘a&e’ into Google image and he will receive an informative, yet patently literal return, full of images that work to rein-force the idea of a&e as it exists today. Enter the same phrase into YossarianLives! and an aerial photograph of an F1 pit-crew comes up. This metaphor is currently active in emergency healthcare and has contributed to a multitude of innovations in its delivery – an example that illustrates the real potential for a search engine like this to deliver

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Google Thinks, Works and Shapes Our Lives, ascribes the inspiration for Google’s search mechanism to the fact that Larry Page, Google’s founder and ceo, grew up in an academic environment. The ‘PageRank’ algorithm works by assigning each web-page a value that indicates how authoritative it is, based on the number and respective authoritativeness of the pages to which it links. ‘Rankings based on citations’, says Levy, ‘aren’t necessarily a mea-sure of excellence – if they were, we wouldn’t hear so much about Steven Pinker – but they do reflect where humans have decided that authority lies.’ 7 It is unlikely that a clear solution to these concerns will be presented anytime soon – but if we are to continue organising infor-mation along these lines, are we inadvertently closing down opportunities for the advancement of our creative industries? Any salvation will require a complete rethink-ing of the methods by which we determine and define authoritative voices. An alternative perspective, however, is being developed: beginning with the writing of an algorithm that presents extraordinarily counter-cultural opportunities for global searching.

Inspired by the paradoxical nature of Google’s search method, J. Paul Neeley and Daniel Foster-Smith (both alumni of the Royal College of Art’s Design Interactions programme) along with Katia Shutova (phd, Cambridge University Computer Laboratory) are devel-oping YossarianLives! – a search engine aptly named after Captain John Yossarian of Joseph Heller’s novel Catch-22. Their algorithm has the ability to detect the structural attributes of a particular idea or object and return metaphorically related images or words. Such con-nections produce an excess of meaning and therefore the opportunity for new interpretation within research topics,

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7 Steven Levy, In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works and Shapes Our Lives Simon & Schuster, 2011, p. 45


we do when standing in front of an artwork, saying that, ‘we are making connections, based on our own experience, fully aware that there is an underlying, pre-configured language of affinities at play within what stands before us.’ The fact that one must flex some cognitive muscle in order to understand the results that are presented by YossarianLives! goes some way towards protecting the concept against critics of communication technology, such as Susan Greenfield. She claims that allowing cogni-tive engagement with technologies that usurp our natural modes of communication, could lead to an actual degen-eration of brain material. Whether or not Greenfield is onto something, and most neurologists have refuted her claims, it is true that the creation of metaphor is a wholly holistic and uniquely human process – one that can involve our every awareness, from bodily sense to the conception of physical realities and abstract notions, to an intuitive and nuanced understanding of experience and situation.

Cognitive linguist George Lakoff explains that the fundamental nature of metaphoricity in lived experi-ence is to be found in the fact of our embodiment.9 It is our upright position in the world, coupled with the fact that we move through space in a closed system (or con-tainer) called a body, that provides us with the impetus and perspective from which to generate metaphor in the process of communication. Metaphorical notions such as getting there with our ideas, which might other-wise fall at the first hurdle, keeping our thoughts locked away so that we might begin to boil-up in anger, are all innate to our physical existence. Phenomenological metaphorical understanding therefore begins from birth and we do not need to be taught how to conceive of,

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9 Christopher Tilley, ‘Metaphor in Language, Thought and Culture’, Metaphor and Material Culture, Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford, 1999, pp. 18–19

Nicola Churchward

societal, cultural and economic value. But what about those realms regarded as metaphor’s principle home? The author and poet Thomas Lynch, when asked if he could imagine turning to this new method of searching for inspi-ration said,

The best one [metaphor machine] I know is Seamus Heaney who seems always to be in metaphor mode. My own sense of it is that a poet does best when he has some ownership of his imaginative capi-tal – metaphors chief among same.8

This comment brings the tension between claiming own-ership of one’s imaginative capital, and taking advantage of technologically generated insights to the fore. Is the user of YossarianLives! still a creator? Or does he become the ‘developer’ of novel, computer-generated concepts, ideas and expression? The notion that our cognition might reflect the action of our intellectual tools begs the question: would users be likely to exhibit a new sensitiv-ity to inspired metaphor, and therefore a greater ability to engage in interpretative contemplation, or would they become lazy in their natural ability for making such con-nections without prompt? In short, like the calculator removed a certain need for learning the finer points of long division, could YossarianLives! diminish our ability to be creative? When asked the same question, Neeley explains: rather than revealing the two sets of correlating metadata in a search, it is left up to the user to determine the relationship between two constructs. He likens this deciphering to the game, ‘six degrees of separation’, saying that, ‘you know there is a connection, you just don’t know what it is, until you begin to think’. One test-user described her experience as akin to the work

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8 Thomas Lynch, email interview with Nicola Churchward 1st March 2012.


Perhaps the desire for ownership of imaginative capital in the face of technology – that not only inspires creativity, but which makes the kind of connections that we recognise as being creative – will one day influence a divide between and within the fields of art and science. Does a scientist have less concern with appropriating a technologically generated concept than a poet or author? Perhaps one of the most extraordinary metaphorical links to be investigated in recent biomedical engineering can be found in the current research into diabetes. The natural production of stripes on the coats of both tiger cubs and young angelfish has inspired the mathematical formulae responsible for a better understanding of how to artifi-cially maintain optimum glucose regulation in the human body.12 YossarianLives!, still in its early stages, may not be able to recognise the relationship between the patterning on a tiger cub’s coat and the functioning of the human pancreas, but the relationship is there and is potentially lifesaving. It is clear therefore, that the value of under-standing and detecting metaphorically connected con-structs, throughout life in its entirety, is crucial to provid-ing meaning and making progress in both art and science. When presented with the idea of the ultimate metaphor machine, Dr. Dylan J. Banks – currently leading research into biologically inspired technology at Imperial College, London – commented that, ‘Any resource that improves accessibility to information and which makes connections between ideas, concepts and facts is of significant value for all those engaged in creative technical development.’13

An excerpt from Swiss writer, philosopher and historian of art René Berger’s book Technocivilisation considers the effect that technology has on the balance of power in society,

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12 Dr D.J. Banks, Soapbox Lecture, Imperial College, February 10th 2012

13 Dr. D. J. Banks, interview March 1st 2012

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or how to decipher it. As such, metaphor governs rather than facilitates reasoning. It constitutes under-standing and provides the basis for an interpretive conception of the world. Without it, there would only be literal description of sensory experience and human communication would be fundamentally impossible. In his essay, ‘Fact, Explanation and Expertise’ philoso-pher Alasdair Macintyre considers the state of a world devoid of interpretation – one in which the stars would be nothing more than patches of light in the night sky. A world of, ‘textures, shapes, smells, sensations, sounds and nothing more’10 would be a world that ‘invites no questions and gives no grounds for furnish-ing any answers.’11

Neeley explains that a key to his search engine’s potential for widespread use lies in the possibility for selecting particular conceptual distances between the two constructs of a search. If the distance is too short, the return will be obvious: so enter ‘cat’ and you could get ‘kitten’ back. If the distance is too long, the results, though conceptually related, may appear to be random. There is a space somewhere in the middle where there exists the potentiality for legible metaphor and in which users may ask for a range of connections to be made, from the very simple to the extremely imagi-native. As well as informing design practice and creative writing, YossarianLives! could be valuable as a tool in specialist education. Metaphoric expression has been instrumental in understanding the thoughts and feel-ings of young people with severe dyslexia. Is there an opportunity for this new algorithm to provide aid for working with those who find it difficult to express themselves with descriptive language?

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10 Alasdair Macintyre, ‘Fact, Explanation and Expertise’, After Virtue, Gerald Duckworth & Co

Ltd; 3rd Revised edition, 2007, pp. 79–88

11 ibid.


This passion for elegance has ensured that mathematical equations, considered to be clunky and without simplic-ity, are in a sense regarded as being somehow wrong and in need of refinement. Moreover, it is the subjective posi-tioning of metaphor in the world – as well as its function – that wields its power, even if it doesn’t rely on an under-standing of emotional experience or visceral sense.

Although YossarianLives! is essentially the work-ings of scientific algorithms, artistic serendipity and one’s own subjectivity still remain an integral part of the search process. It is impossible to predict which manner of invention or design might be generated by this tech-nologically facilitated linking of subjective and objec-tive experience. What is clear is that this construct is an example of unprecedented and expansive searching, and is sure to create what German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer termed as metaphor’s ‘fresh fusion of horizons’16 for all who use it. Unlocking the power of metaphor can only enrich that fundamental aspect of the fabric of our existence. How and where it will constitute itself in terms of cultural development is yet to be seen, and depends greatly on the algorithm and its behaviour when unleashed into the virtual world for all to use. With this in mind, perhaps it is worth listening to expert of the algoworld Kevin Slavin, who describes a certain kind of autonomy exhibited by these mathematical formulae as they go about their business. He says ‘the landscape was always made by this sort of weird uneasy collabora-tion between nature and man, but now there’s a third kind of co-evolutionary force… algorithms – and we will have to learn to understand them as nature… and in a way, they are.’17

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16 Hans-Georg Gadamer in Christopher Tilley, Metaphor and Material Culture. ‘Metaphor in Language, Thought and Culture’, p. 8

17 Kevin Slavin, How algo-rithms shape our world, TED talk posted July 2011 www.ted.com/talks/kevin_slavin_how_algo-rithms_shape_our_world.html?quote=1005

Nicola Churchward

All technological innovation has two sides, not, as is commonly thought, according to the good or bad use that one makes of it, but according to the change that it makes in the distribution and exercise of power. It takes power from some and gives it to others, by changing the reality for everyone.14

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14 René Berger, Technocivilisation, Presses Polytechniques et Universitaires Romandes, 2010, p. 25

15 Paul Dirac in John Polkinghorne, Belief in God in an Age of Science, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, Yale, p. 2

The shift in distribution of power as a result of Google’s rise to eminence is well documented. If YossarianLives! were to become as ubiquitous as the Google search box – and why not, considering the ubiquity of metaphor in our lives – would there be an effect on the distribution of power in the creative industries? Could we see a shift across cultural or professional categories as a result of technologically inspired metaphor? The differing views of the poet and scientist here serve to provide insight into the attitude and sentiment towards creativity within, what many people regard as, discrete realms of interest. Their mutual reliance on metaphor as a means of inter-pretation, however, illuminates a common ground from which they both operate. Perhaps it is to be expected that a poet might prefer to take inspiration from his peers, rather than a machine, and that the scientist has no qualms about accepting technological assistance in the formulation of ideas. However, the most abstract of scien-tific metaphors are not without recourse to human sensi-bilities. Paul Dirac, who made vital contributions to the field of quantum mechanics, stated his most fundamental belief to be that, ‘the laws of nature should be expressed in beautiful equations.’15 These metaphors for life itself, he insisted, were to reflect the beauty and simplicity of the natural world to the highest possible degree; senti-ments that have influenced the way many mathematicians subsequently think about the writing of formulae.


As entries, strike-throughs, spelling mistakes, re-entries, question marks, lists within lists, bullet-points, dashes, personalised bullet-points, squares, asterisks, circled entries, bold entries, ambitious entries and already-done entries are scattered across the page, the mind moves quicker than the pen to create this masterpiece in its ini-tial form. Margins, the bottom of the list or the space in between the lines are an opportunity to add information that could not keep up with the mind or that were simply forgotten. At times, these secondary entries will appear in a different colour where an alternative writing tool has had to be used.

The creator of a list has no intention to design their thoughts but merely to order them visually in tangible form. The back of a card, an old envelope, some scrap paper, a notebook, a smart phone, a saved email draft,

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A List154

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a train ticket or a post-it note provide the canvas for this mind montage to be drawn out.

The activity of list-making is both common to all yet entirely individualistic. There is a sense of urgency attached to something that is created on-the-go or in between activities, and maybe it is the extent of this pres-sure that, when making a list, normal writing conven-tions are ignored. Baselines are misused, words are writ-ten across them rather than on them; the ascenders on letters become muted; the descenders have added flam-boyancy and the margins are no longer a no-go area for words but a place to fill with words, additional thoughts, numbers, sketches and question marks.

In a moment’s pause, a second thought is given to put-ting these thoughts into better order or form, perhaps in order of priority or alphabetically. This can be done at a later date. Sometimes, a complete re-draft of the list might be necessary. If it is a list of that type it can be prepared to make sense to others. It is at this point that a design element might be added: colour coding, font selection, margin widths and line lengths.

There is an unspoken hierarchy to the various forms of lists that surround us in our daily lives. Train times, shopping lists, gift lists, hate lists, wish lists, to-do lists, today’s food specials, contents pages, registers, stock lists, missing lists, menus and guest lists. The different forms of lists are matched and paired with a tried and tested format. Registers are done alphabetically; shop-ping lists by memory, train times chronologically etc.

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Jigna Chauhan

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a bookmark, a coaster or a space to sketch; it is embel-lished with important things, mustn’t forgets and mental notes. It ages well. Every mark on this creation is part of its existence. Folds in the page create creases across the unused printed lines; they battle with the thoughts sprawled across them. A new dimension is added to the form where the author has rolled the corners back and forth between their fingers.

At the height of its usability, the list holds authority over its creator; unchecked items glare at you and make you feel guilty for the things you have not yet accomplished. A mutual resistance grows and other lists arise. Before the list has peaked it finds itself at the bottom of a bag, on a supermarket floor, wedged in a shopping basket, slotted in the corner of a sofa stuck to some crumbs, at the end of a book that was being read, in the shredder, at the back of another list, propping up a table, underneath a doodle, fallen on the pavement or sitting helplessly in the recycling bin, sitting next to the envelope that wasn’t chosen and another list that has efficient strikes through most entries.

On the off chance that a list may be revisited or found again by its creator, they might experience the sense of satisfaction that comes with being able to cross off multi-ple items from the list. The single action of drawing a line or the flicking of a tick enhances the achievement of completion.

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When a list finds itself in the hands of someone other than its author, different aspects of it might be scruti-nised. The graphologist looks at the space between the lines and the curves or flicks of the letters, the size of the capital letters, the margins around the texts and the slant of the handwriting. The artist dreams up the story that precedes the list and what might follow. The curious looks around to find its owner. And others disregard it.

When an individual has shown extraordinary qualities or talents, the contents of a list they have made might become valuable to others. The lives of great scientists, musicians, actors, writers or designers are retraced and dissected by making their diaries or notebooks public. Whilst the content of their home is on show so is the content of their minds. Private information, messily scrawled across the page with changes and errors, sup-posedly give insight into a frame of mind. A laundry list suddenly reveals secrets of their lifestyle, an unseen side to their character.

This information, analysis, format, or story is irrelevant to the author; the content is what is of interest to them. Their document is plagued with encryptions of coding, different methods of ‘crossing off ’, ticks, strike-throughs and circles around ticks. Only some entries have num-bers, where clearly an attempt at prioritising has been made. Some have dates next to them, for deadlines and finales, giving an added importance, a ticking reminder. These juxtapositions need not make sense to others.

Having been created, a list triumphantly sits at the top of important papers. It is versatile and can be used as

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Tom Hodgkinson of the Idler Academy is napping. Somewhere beneath this beguiling bookshop-meets-coffee-house is a boudoir where the idly brilliant rest their weary heads and gather their thoughts for the burden of doing-not-very-much later this evening. It is a curious task, this idleness, one which must be faced with a bra-zen gusto that seems to defy all logic, but in the interests of being productively useless, it is best to run with it. And so I do. I run with it with an energy and a frivolous delight that conquers all contradictions, all bemused head scratching. I run so fast that I am almost, but not entirely blinkered to the pretty lie that lurks in this anachronis-tic shelter of old school bohemia, because to challenge it is to admit defeat at every point of argument. The Idler Academy is a dodo and peacock hybrid: it is actually extinct, but is so brilliant and weird and cocky that you can’t help but look at it.

Jeanette Farrell

An Idler is Resting 160

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163162 edited by Hodgkinson, a publication that paid homage to Samuel Johnson’s series of essays of the same name. Tucked within its pages lay the oeuvre of the perfect idler. Ribald boozehounds like Jeffery Bernard and Bruce Robinson were well attended to, while Damien Hirst, sermonising about the incomparable sense of freedom gained by getting someone else to do your work, offers this nugget of wisdom ‘the answer of how to live is to stop thinking about it and to just live’. Drivel. The idler of old was a charming rogue, devoid of the shackles of respon-sibility, rich enough to buy confidence in a life without money and restricted only by the geographical boundaries of turn-of-the-century Soho.

The Academy however is an altogether more sophisticated affair.

The Idler Academy is housed in a beautiful build-ing. As Hodgkinson will later attest, ‘It’s got a garden which we thought was amazing; it’s a really gorgeous building. It’s been absolutely brilliant. You’ve got com-plete freedom, you can do whatever you want here, in terms of events and courses and lectures, it’s just been non-stop fantastic events. We’ve got Latin going on upstairs, we had a ukelele class going on last night’. True to the establishment’s motto libertas per cultum a roundta-ble discussion is taking place in the middle of the room, on the highest-highs and the lowest-lows of Latin gram-mar. Local hero Mr Gwynn leads a group of enthusiasts in a chant broken only by sighs and grumblings, as a group of five pencil-wielding pupils delve deep into the ancient world in the hope of transporting themselves from the laborious toil of this one.

Jeanette Farrell

It is advised, when approaching Tom Hodgkinson, to make an appointment in advance. He resides on Exmoor, most of the time – thinking, breathing, think-ing – but in Notting Hill every-so-often, one must pounce and then knock softly to wake him from his afternoon slumber. An email confirmed that I should call by at 4pm but my punctuality, the product of living in a city shack-led to a ticking clock, is not rewarded and by early even-ing the idler is still not awake. I should wait and absorb a Latin class that is taking place amongst the books, among the tomes that advise on how to live. I should wait amid the argy-bargy that informs the character of the place; the finger pointing, the head-shaking and the rage. I should wait amongst my favourite, the invitation to talk aloud to yourself, to abuse the world fiercely and directly into the ether. If play, as opposed to work, is ‘the suspension of consequence’, it has found a merry home on the corner of Westbourne Park Road.

An Idler’s Abode

The Idler Academy was opened in March 2010 at the back-end of Notting Hill. Notting Hill is comprised of approximately two million heart-breakingly louche and carefree bankers; the vein-popping surge of delight expe-rienced in The City 6 am to midnight, Monday to Friday is shock-absorbed at the weekends into the fabric of the birthplace of ska in the 60s and of genteel bohemia in the 70s. This creates an odd mix and an air of panic in the palpable determination to out-lounge each other, and so in many ways Hodgkinson has found his target audience. The Academy was born in the name of the Idler magazine

An Idler is Rest ing

165164 extraordinary?’. This, of course, is not an easy question to answer: placed on the spot, trying to keep your head down among the disorder of a bookshop that attempts to stretch the boundaries of the modern encounter.

Well, that was our plan when we started it. If you go to your Starbucks you’re not going to bump into anybody; so we wanted to have somewhere where you would actually start talking to somebody, and talk to strangers, and that really does happen. And if you come in and you’re browsing at the shelves and then you turn around and suddenly you’re having a kind of philosophical chat, and you can chip in and say something. But I think some people find it quite intimidating for that reason, which I hadn’t antici-pated. We’ve heard this comment quite a lot, that people like the idea of it, they’d like to come, but peo-ple aren’t really used to that thing, that open convi-vial thing.

It is indeed intimidating, but it is also lovely. This com-bination makes it quite the controversial spot. It is as out-moded as the desire to reintroduce the ukulele as an everyday feature of modern life and a casual sense of elitism is more present than an elephant in the room. For whom is this idle time for, this pause for play and imagi-nation? It certainly seems particular to a demographic:

A shop actually is genuinely open. Anybody can walk in all day long. That’s one of the things I thought was really nice about us right from the beginning; it is genuinely democratic. Yes you have to pay for the lessons because we have our overheads and we want to pay the teachers properly. There are things like the Free School Movement and Occupy St Paul’s which I have done talks at; so there are people out there doing that as well. That’s brilliant. I have friends who are involved in the Free School.

Jeanette Farrell

An Idler is Vocal

He is rested. The nod has been given to descend the staircase into an office comprised of a chaise-longue, antique desks and an oriental screen to divide the sleep-ing from the awake. A Samuel Johnson epigram, comes to mind, ‘They who sleep every night until they can no longer sleep, and rise only that exercise may enable them to sleep again.’ Perhaps this is its 2012 manifestation. Tom Hodgkinson is everything the Daily Mail and others offended by the seeming origins of the Idler on a great pile of stately cash hope he is; he has an incredibly posh voice, he is drinking Rooibos tea and he is quoting Aristotle. He has had, as he will admit himself, the ‘best education you could possibly get’ and this will come back in a circular fashion over the course of our interview; the posh voice versus the system.

I tell the idler about my encounter with a group of Latin enthusiasts upstairs, and how, in a way, this was eve-rything I thought the academy would be. He is delighted. ‘We had a lovely print of the eighteenth-century coffee house. There was something like one coffee house for every 200 people. And these coffee houses, they had dif-ferent themes: there was one where you were only allowed to talk in Latin. There’s one picture where someone is throwing a cup of coffee in someone’s face; a heated debate about a point of Latin grammar or something.’ This is a wonderful image and it is writ large in the ethos of the place. The first time I encountered Hodgkinson he was standing to the side of the bookshop as I had a cup of tea. He was flicking through a book he had picked up and was reading aloud excerpts from The Life of Evelyn Waugh, asking anyone who caught his eye, ‘Isn’t that


167166 When the Idler was established, back in the early 90s, the idea was, true to Johnson himself, that it would posit an argument against the work ethic, against the reduction of a life to working hours. It was a lei-surely, strong and eloquent argument but it always incorporated strange variety of argument Alex James whom many claimed was the most useless member of Blur wrote for it and spawned a whole new genera-tion in his image, the Notting Hill of 2012. Has this politics dissipated over the years? What happened to anarchy-née-what-is-this-anarchy-in-the-first-place?

Well, I wasn’t self-consciously an anarchist, but when we started the Idler which is against slave labour, and against the 9 to 5, against drudgery and work, an anarchist distributor picked it up very quickly and said this is great. And then I got sent these books, and there’s a famous book called Why Work?: it’s a collec-tion of anarchist essays, including one from William Morris about what should work be, could work be more creative? The Industrial Revolution came along and people became automatons in factories. And the history of the trades union is to try to just gradually improve the conditions and pay, but they’re still in the factories. Should you own the factories, like Marx said, workers need to seize the means of production. Well that in a sense is what we’re trying to do, in having our own shop and magazine and, you know, do it yourself, start your own fanzine, start your own band; so that’s what it’s about for me: it’s about taking responsibility for your own life, not blaming other people, which is difficult. Voluntary organisations function better than organisations that operate on coercion. An example of an anarchist organisation might be the Women’s Institute. It’s not funded by corporations or estates. It wasn’t invented by a politician. It was a kind of genuine up-swell, a system of mutual aid, mutual help. That’s

Jeanette Farrell

It is very temporary to run a free school from a squat. They tend to be ideologically burdened, so that you get to a situation where people will refuse to teach because that’s some kind of assumption of superior-ity on their behalf. In any case, those Occupy or Free Schools are incredibly intimidating. The punk squat is one of the most intimidating places in the world, so although I recognise that sometimes people do find us intimidating, we try to make it as friendly as we can.

The gentle but fierce presence of Joe Strummer remains potent around these parts. Mythologies of The Clash and of West London squats, a brilliant and vibrant time are still just about audible through the revving of suv engines and the territorial barking of posh puppies. An anomaly, a privately schooled and privileged white boy who tried to subvert ideas of race and class, seems latent in our con-versation here although in reality it seems quieted year on year

When I went to university, this is where I wanted to come. That was my dream to have a flat on Portobello Road and get a job in Rough Trade and to actually do that, and we had a lovely house that we shared, and I just loved the vibe. For me it The Clash. It was punk and West London squats, the Portobello Road reg-gae scene, Carnival and that kind of thing. We used to buy our black hash on the corner when we were 14, so it always had an edge and of course it lost that later. But Portobello Road, I walk up and down it now and it’s exactly the same as before. And quite a lot of these people are still around. The beatnik poet Michael Horowitz comes in and there was a guy Jean-Michel who died, who was a hero of ours, a sort of Notting Hill mystic. He was into crop circles and that kind of thing. We have Jean-Michel society meetings here. It is that oldie sort of bohemian thing.


169168 anarchic heroes mingle with that of twenty-first-century commerce. Perhaps best served with a pinch of salt and good humour – the most difficult parts of Hodgkinson’s ideology are protected by the obstacle of his immense charm, and charm is never, ever idle. It might be Joe Strummer speaking with the voice of Alex James – there are good points to be made that are endearing and chal-lenging but all most people will hear is an incessant rant about cheese. Time waits for no man and Tom Hodgkinson, tired from reminiscing, is eager to get back to work. I wish I could say that as I left the world of the Idler Academy I bowed out with a salute of ego vobis vod-edico to a group of Latin loving pensioners who strummed ‘Police and Thieves’ on the ukulele in response, but it was not to be. An afternoon at the Academy, however, is assur-ance that if this does happen it will be the most gentle, strange and idle of anarchic uprisings.

Jeanette Farrell

sort of anarchy in action, something like that. So it’s where people come together, a village hall committee. It is spontaneous creation.

The idea of the Women’s Institute as an anarchist organi-sation is such a lovely one, that behind the poise of the well-kept woman lies a seething political statement. I love this gentle anarchy, misty-eyed, fetishised, kind. Where did it come from, this strange anarchic impulse? How did he find it in the class warfare that accompanies his accent?

What’s appealing about anarchy and bohemianism is that people from more backgrounds end up there. You know, so it could be your fallen aristocrats, criminals. The place we used to hang around in Clerkenwell was a real bohemian den and that didn’t really matter where you came from, it was people united by a search for freedom and a desire to create a life outside of the conventional one.

Some people rise above the resentment through bohemia, and one example is Graham Burnett who I met at the Crass household, who are these anarchist punks, before they did Crass the anarchist punk band they did all of these sort of weird underground musi-cal experiments and were involved in the Stonehenge Free Festival, and they were a mix of posh and working class people, who live together on a vegetable growing retreat commune situation. And they put their record out, and what my friend Graham did –he comes from a sort of working class background – is they introduce this middle class idea about politics and anarchy and freedom to a working class audience, who then became sort of liberated through this, and were able to create their own lives and not feel that they were just treading water, in somebody else’s idea of how they should live.

The Idler Academy is at a great remove from the punk squat. Within its solid and elegant walls the spirit of


¤

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175Colophon

176 Uselessness is difficult and unstable; it is not an idea or condi-tion that can be counted upon. Uselessness has no definitive-ness. It comes and goes, like boredom, but can have a surpris-ing suddenness. Between one breath and the next this genius loci of broken things can possess objects, people and places, cover a lens with scratches and put a hole in a bucket.

It is a quality latent in all things and all people.Uselessness is also a form of knowledge; it is a

response, an acknowledgment that something has dropped out of the circuit of usefulness and chosen instead a path to abandonment. To understand what is or isn’t useless is itself a useless activity. To know what is useless would require a wealth of information, an intensive interrogation of someone’s life history, their likes and dislikes, mental habits and habitual tendencies. It would be an incredibly intimate and invasive body of ticks and crosses. And it would be unstable, ebbing and flowing as time unfolds and the temperament of the subject alters and changes. In this situation a definition of uselessness would be fragile and shy and any discussion would lapse into a tired exchange of opinions; a tedious succession of agree-ments or disagreements or ‘whatevers’.

Or perhaps the determination of uselessness could be systematised through the establishment of mutually agreed ground rules; perhaps a uselessness probability algorithm could be worked upon? This could be an app on a smart phone: scan an object, person or situation and get a handy numerical rating of said thing’s uselessness factor. But would you scan yourself? Knowledge of your own uselessness would be useful; employers, shops, government departments would no doubt delight in this and scan everyone continually. We would all be tracked by our own unique uselessness factor.

But then of course this already happens. What are credit agencies doing, if not assessing our usefulness to loan specu-lators? What is a CV if not a guide to probable usefulness? But each of these examples operate in relation to usefulness, the uselessness is left unstated. Uselessness exists here in a silence, in a denial of access; in a grammar of rejection.

A useful argument about uselessness is, then, not about what is or isn’t useless, but would instead be a matter of understanding the nature of uselessness itself, its ontology. But to begin this argument it is necessary to ask one question: what if uselessness is actually the natural order of things and it is only the chattering minds of humans and animals that brought, tragically, usefulness into the world?

Codicil