rodcorp

Dream about art / MMXVI in MMXII

I had a dream the other night that I was visiting my old art school in Coventry. Artists were putting on a show in the painting studios on one of the top floors of the art block. They looked engaged and thoughtful, and their art looked strong.

Matt Jones was making a magnificent installation called IAMTHE. A golden room jewelled with precious stones, mirrors and lenses, with LEDs and neon flashing and occulting. Jones planned to display himself at the rear of the room inside a gold sarcophogeal suit, its massive encasing engraved with encrypted marks and barnacled with sensors and projectors emitting fields of lidar, laser, electro-magnetism, radio and light. He would be surrounded by symbols of confidence, success and good luck. It looked like an attack submarine's control room in the Palace of Versailles.

Jack Schulze was organising the show. He was striding around with two small shapes cocooned on his chest and back, giving instructions by pointing at people and wolf-glaring, always in silence because he didn't want to wake up the small shapes. He clicked his fingers at me and with a backhand indicated a corner space, the only empty one I'd seen - he wanted me to exhibit.

My immediate thought was to show an Overfinch-customised Range Rover Autobiography 5.0 GT with the piano wood steering wheel*. There would be a length of green garden hose piping its exhaust into a smoke-hazed interior, and behind the wheel would sit a screaming hedge fund manager, a heavy-handed reference to the popes of Bacon and Velazquez and Hirst's shark.

But the Range Rover would not have fit into the building's lift, so plan B was two, smaller pieces. On the floor, there would be a metal sphere the size of a head, made of the compressed layers of aluminium tin foil used to wrap my morning toast for the last five years. And on the wall I would install a telephone handset, in which could be heard my dead mother's voice. I'd recently learned that because she'd never had a mobile phone and had always used those handsets which were powered solely by the landline phone network itself, BT's operators had been able to capture and channel the echoes of her conversations that still vibrated up and down the network.

When I heard her ghost whisper in the receiver I said "I miss you", and woke up.

* I have embellished this dream, but only a tiny bit. The Jones IAMTHE image collaged from these sources: 1, 2, 3.

 

Glasgow art Jan 2012

Alasdair Gray, City Recorder at GoMA until 13 Aug 2012. In 1977 Gray was commissioned as Glasgow's artist recorder, and he drew about 30 pictures of daily street life, people, buildings, cars, fashions. Fantastic drawings. Gray describes the project:

I brought to the store sketches of well-known or typical Glaswegians with as much as possible of their everyday surroundings. I brought sketches of nearby streets, many of them semi-demolished because industries were being closed in what had once been a strong working-class district. That summer was unusually sunny so I worked a lot outside, drawing what I could see directly with pencil or Rotring pen. The drawings were pasted on to boards coated with special paint that sealed off acids beneath. Then I tinted them with watercolour, crayon pencil and in a few areas acrylic paint, though I chiefly used it as a background sky. I deliberately kept the colours light, to stop them distracting from the character of the outlines. In this way I finished 33 paintings before reluctantly leaving the job.

Harry Papadopoulos at Street Level Photo Works until 25 Feb 2012. Great photos of the post-punk scene in Glasgow and London. Edwyn Collins, Devo, The Associates, many others, all looking like children. Reminded me of Ewen Spencer's work in the 2000s.

Tales of the City at GoMA until 1 Dec 2012. Standouts: Daphne Wright's project for the Gorbals redevelopment and Martin Boyce's ventilation grilles. The rest a bit average.

You, Me, Something Else at GoMA until 18 Mar 2012. Andrew Miller's work is funny and there's something in the work of Karla Black and James McLardy (whose work reminds me of Martin Westwood somewhat), but the rest is weak. More images.

I am here / The best... totally shitty / Steve Jobs biography

Notes on Walter Isaacson's Steve Jobs, 2011.

“If something isn’t right, you can’t just ignore it and say you’ll fix it later,” he said. “That’s what other companies do.” 

Despite the occasional dud product and brink-of-death corporate experience, it's impressive how Apple systemised the creation of excellent products and services. They do it by being brutally focused, by simplifying, by pursuing high quality and emotionally resonant products over short-term profit, by vertically integrating and tightly controlling the components, processes and experience as much as possible. All qualities to inspire.

The great products raised the design and desirability bar, uniting consumers in a high-end version of Warhol's dictum about mass-manufactured products - you know that Liz Taylor drinks Coke too ¹. There's a fair bit of honesty about earlier hardware products that weren't so insanely great, but less on the recent - there's nothing on the horrible spaghetti that iTunes bloated into ².

There is something interesting in the way that the act of selling is concentrated into Jobs himself ³, into his deal-making with Gates, Disney et al, and later the one-last-thing-ing at Apple's events, and to a lesser extent into the product itself, the adverts, the Apple stores. We don't read much about the analysts in Apple's sales and marketing organisations. But all that's to be expected in a biography.

Because its lens is the individual, a biography inevitably supports the great man theory ⁴ of management, in which a hero single-handedly achieves great things, often against the odds. The theory is common in management analysis today - Jobs the visionary - but is problematic: Asymco has a nice trio of posts querying the structural integrity of the great/stupid manager theory: Apple, Nokia, RIM. And indeed even within Apple the hero narrative rankled. Ive: "it hurts when he takes credit for one of my designs" ⁵.

People were either “enlightened” or “an asshole.” Their work was either “the best” or “totally shitty.”

Jobs was a very talented and driven man, but he was also capricious and troubled, and must have been very unpleasant to work for at times.

“He would shout at a meeting, ‘You asshole, you never do anything right,’” Debi Coleman recalled. “It was like an hourly occurrence.

Ive again:

there are other times, I think honestly, when he’s very frustrated, and his way to achieve catharsis is to hurt somebody. And I think he feels he has a liberty and a license to do that. The normal rules of social engagement, he feels, don’t apply to him. 

Now that we know the full story - the roller coaster and triumph at work and his illness and unfairly early death - it's tempting to re-interpret the narrative, to read Apple's products as the Freudian (solid state) death drive rendered in glass and aluminium, a collective memento mori in the cloud, the thanatological sublime. Or as the opposite: to describe his project as an attempt to make products that utterly transcend their ephemerality, denying their and his ultimate end-point ("I am here."). But neither would be correct: this was simply an intense man who believed in and for most part achieved the consumer electronic products he wanted.

Jobs's epiphany, 2005:

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything - all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

But how terribly sad to have spent so little time with your wife and family. In pouring so much energy and attention into the work, a deficit was surely felt in life, at home.

“Why did you do it?” I asked. “I wanted my kids to know me,” he said.

.

The footnotes:

1. The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: (From A to B and Back Again), 1975: "What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it."
   Incidentally, Warhol and Keith Haring tried MacPaint at Sean Lennon's ninth birthday party in 1985 - Jobs had brought Lennon a Macintosh as a present. Warhol: "Look! Keith! I drew a circle!", but we don't know if the circle was perfect.
2. I'd hoped for but didn't get insight into the conversation about the apparent design disconnect between minimal hardware design and kitschy software design. A guess then: either Apple isn't as integrated and consistent as we'd all believe, or Apple unashamedly aims for that emotional resonance over a strict truth to the material.
3. Not from the Isaacson book, but Mossberg: "He could sell. Man, he could sell." - from Myslewski's The Life and Times of Steven Paul Jobs, 2011.
4. Heroic pre-history starts with the Greek myths, but Thomas Carlyle's On Heroes develops a theory of great men in 1841, Herbert Spencer's criticism of it fifty years later in The Study of Sociology is that the theory is obviously massively reductive, and he suggests that society maketh the man before the man can remake his society.
5. Although compare Tim Cook: "I've never given a rat's ass about that." 

 

Good books for SF readers

If you like science fiction, these are very well written books you might like - some of them SF, some not.

• Le Guin, Left Hand of Darkness or Dispossessed
• Faber, Under the Skin
• Robinson, Years of Rice and Salt
• De Abaitua, The Red Men
• Mitchell, Number9Dream or Cloud Atlas
• Ballard, High Rise or Supercannes
• Calvino, Cosmicomics or anything he did really
• Ings, Weight of Numbers
• Borges, all of it
• Bester, Tiger Tiger (The Stars My Destination)
• Nabokov, Ada or Ardor
• Gloss, Dazzle of Day
• Vonnegut, Sirens of Titan
• M John Harrison, Light
• Zamyatin, We
• Disch, Camp Concentration
• Delany, Babel-17 or Dhalgren

 

Art in London, Oct 2011 - Jan 2012 (updated)

(Note to self.) If I were in London now or in the next few weeks, instead of Frieze I'd probably be getting to these shows:

Saatchi/C4's New Sensations' show The Future Can Wait, with James Jessop, closed 17 Oct. I was at art school with Jim, he's a strong painter.

Charles Avery at Pilar Corrias, til 12 Nov. It's a small but very good show - he's such a great and careful draughtsman. The gallerist told me that the big drawings take him a year and are all pre-sold. His world-making reminds me of Paul Noble (another good draughtsman - see below).

Charles Matton at AVA Annex, til 16 Nov (although the website since implies that it has already closed). Thanks to Tom Armitage for the pointer.

Friend Stuart Buchanan at Modern Artists Gallery (nb which isn't in London), til 19 Nov.

Martin Westwood at Stanley Picker, til 26 Nov.

Paul Noble at Gagosian, 10 Nov - 17 Dec.

Wilhelm Sasnal at Whitechapel, til 1 Jan 2012 (and while there see the Rothko paintings, til 26 Feb 2012).

Gerhard Richter at Tate Modern, til 8 Jan 2012 (and while there see the Tacita Dean turbine hall installation, until 11 Mar 2012).

A Piece of Paper (group show) at Madder 139, 16 Nov - 14 Jan 2012.

John Martin at Tate Britain, til 15 Jan 2012.

Malicious Damage: The life and crimes of Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell at Islington Museum, til 21 Jan 2012.

Leonardo Da Vinci at National Gallery, 9 Nov - 5 Feb 2012. Leonardo doesn't make me gibber the way that Velazquez does, but this is a truly rare event - it's the first time both Virgin of the Rocks paintings have been shown together, and probably the only time in your lifetime. You will need to book tickets.

Suwappu fragment

Suwappu is by Dentsu and by Berg.

What happened next.

• Fox: <Zzzip> Look at what they make you give
• Deer: <Ping> We're running out of time - please help. Badger's dreams are getting worse!
• Fox: <Zzipp> OK! We need the others @bear @owl

They turn to go, sunshine and lamplight glinting from the dust hanging in the air at the crossroads.

In a clearing stands a Bear with teeth and a Rabbit who looks like a gentleman-pirate. It is always raining on Bear, but Bear is from the mountains and doesn't mind.

• Bear jumps <Thrummm!>, silently, points. But says nothing.
• Rabbit: <Ting> Yass. Lets go to work
• Rabbit: <Ting> betimes the tube

Bear and Rabbit tap their Oyster cards as they enter the tube.

Owl and Raccoon are together by a river. Raccoon is the trickster-fixer. Owl is a mentat with his wings carefully folded behind his back. Owl pauses, thinks.

• Owl: <chirp!> His fears, the eyefires threaten us all. We will help.
• Raccoon: Oh @badger! Tiger's blood! I can fix it! <Nangg!>
• Raccoon: <Nanng!> I found this boat - lets get going! Quik!
• Rabbit: <Tong!> Tube broken. Stupid warrens in ground.

Bear sighs and waits quietly, but Rabbit simmers impatiently.

• Bear 8X8 Rabbit
• Rabbit-bear: Dig to freedom! <Ting!>
• Bear-rabbit: <Thrumkmkm!>

Owl and Raccoon are in the boat, drifting down the river.

• Owl: <fwirp!> @raccoon remembrys me of a pussycat I once knew
• Raccoon: Shut it Iggle Piggle <NANG-NAHHHNG!>

They fall into a pointed silence.

Time passes. 

Owl and Raccoon's boat gently runs aground as the river widens out onto a vast plain with a settlement to one side. On the shore are Deer and Fox.

• Raccoon: Ho @Deer @Fox
• Deer: Can you help Badger?
• Owl: Will there be compensation? <chirp>
• Deer boggles: He *needs* us.
• Owl: <chirp> You should let us wet our beaks a little

Deer frowns. Then Owl blushes.

• Owl: <Meep>

The ground shudders, and Bear-Rabbit and Rabbit-Bear spring from a hole.

• Deer 8X8 Raccoon
• Raccoon-Deer 8X8 Owl
• Raccoon-Owl 8X8 Bear-Rabbit
• Bear-Owl 8X8 Raccoon-Rabbit
• ...
• All: ha!

It's quite a party. Eventually, they all swap back.

Badger, despite some recent unsettling news, is starting to feel a bit happier because he can see that the others love him. Perhaps these lasers can be put to use fighting crime.

ID card database destroyed (a Freudian impression)

A database built to hold the fingerprints and personal details of millions of ID card holders has today been publicly destroyed. Around 500 hard disk drives and 100 back up tapes containing the details of 15,000 holders have been magnetically wiped and shredded. They will soon be incinerated in an environmentally friendly waste-for-energy process. [Home Office, 10 Feb 2011]

This story - the decommissioning of the ID Card database - immediately reminded me of Derrida and Freud. Bravo, Home Office. But here's one of the problems with data, databases and assurance: when the data itself is intangible and easily copiable, it's hard to evidence its destruction with any certainty. You might essay a metonymic evocation of the database with the material the data was stored on (and here's another example) or hold up a talisman:

Or place the means of destruction on stage. Better: ritualise the moment of destruction - with a gloved middle finger, Immigration Minister "Damian Green presses the button". ID confetti:

And then you'd need to destroy them again with a purifying flame, rendering pieces of disk platter jewellery into smoke: "They will soon be incinerated in an environmentally friendly waste-for-energy process."

Freud might call that the governmental mute death drive, attempting to destroy memory's archive, but without leaving any archival trace of its own (see Derrida on Freud, Archive Fever, 10). But the remainders are cinders or shadows, the ghost of the archive, smoke from its incineration, memory of the identity carte postale, and a new archive is immediately created.

Favourites at Frieze art fair 2010

 

Wilhelm Sasnal, Peter Peri, Lorna Simpson, Frederick Kunath, Robert Longo, Ged Quinn, Alex Buldakov, Stas Volyaslovsky, Keiichi Tanaami, Charles Avery, Thomas Struth, Seb Patane, Ariel Schlesinger, Walton Ford.

More here.

God-like resonance / for a priceless coin of time: David Mitchell

Notes from David Mitchell's talk on his The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet at the Brighton Festival, 6 May 2010. 

Gremlins in the system... ooh I have a God-like resonance tonight [the audio is erratic, by turns echoing and then cutting out]

[Dejima as C18th] cultural cat-flap

The Dutch named their warehouses.

For a priceless coin of time, their hands are linked by a few inches of bitter herb [...] I wish, he thinks, spoken words could be captured and kept in a locket. [...] Crickets scritter and clirk in the garden's low walls of stone [The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet, p122-3]

Elmore Leonard's dictum that readers skip description but not dialogue, as if the quote marks catch the eye.

all of my book [a slip of the tongue but appropriate since they are all one book in some senses]

inability to say what you want [is the interesting bit in dialogue/communication - this reality of miscommunication present in much of his writing, eg the stammer in Black Swan Green]

Use of one, then two then three narrators to gradually dial up intensity and pace.

floor became the wall [lifted from a shot in Donnie Darko, and an attempt to avoid cliche]

On developing characters: starting with their autobiography - their relationships to the key people in their life, and attitude to money, love, work, sex, death, etc.

Film as the guiding/organising metaphor of perception/experience since the second half of the C20th. Thinking in terms of camera angles and shots.

Questions on William Golding from the floor: acknowledged as an important influence, and similarly jump from one style to another "like a human flea"

The book's published next week but they're selling at his author talks already - I've only dipped into it so far, but it looks great.

Related: How we work: David Mitchell.

Bond: From Russia With Lunch

Notes from the City Reads Panel: From Russia With Love, 2 May 2010. Brighton's collective reading event - City Reads - took on Ian Fleming's From Russia with Love this year.

At the talk: Andrew Lycett - Fleming's official biographer; Simon Winder - author of The Man Who Saved Britain: a Personal Journey into the Disturbing World of James Bond; and Rowan Pelling - broadcaster, journalist and former editor of the Erotic Review. (Lycett is knowledgeable but seems a bit uncomfortable to be there. Winder is clever, entertaining, and his book is very funny.)

AL: IF was getting bore at the point of writing FRWL

SW: Bond's absence from the first half of the book - mythologising

RP: description of Red Grant: creepy, sexy

AL: Ann described IF's work as "pornographic nonsense". Didn't encourage IF, who wanted to write literary novels. Most successful is Casino Royale [really?!]. IF always felt he was competing with Ann's circle of literary writer friends.

SW: FRWL is for small stakes

Pleasingly ordinary, mundane. 

Is there a link between higher stakes and higher consumption? - Bond's consumption of drinks, cigarettes and food is extraordinary. The drinks mark him as a functioning alcoholic, the smokes must have announced him to his targets as the assassin with the tubercular cough, and the food... he'd be unable to move.

AL: FRWL shows a domestic Bond: jams at breakfast, fussy, camp

SW: IF obliged to be a tough-guy - bluff? 

SW: IF died alcoholic.

Fleming-Bond, wish-fulfilment.

SW: Gypsies in FRWL: "naked, trying to bite each other's breasts" - couldn't be portrayed in the film

AL: Bond as "blunt instrument of a government department" [and so very, very blunt!]

SW: structure of the books: great setups which then deteriorate terribly - often as if he reached a self-imposed page limit and then became indifferent

Leitmotif: the steady and inglorious decline of books, Fleming, empire, Bond...

AL: it's as if the process of writing the Bond novels directly contributed to his death [a weakening, dissipation] of old age [before his time], of smoking, drinking, of the emotional energy the books took [of the marital fights; Winder: "a thousand impacts"]

AL: Was writing FRWL as his marriage cracked up - had met his girlfriend Blanche in early 56

SW: Bond appearing to die in FRWL is unnecessary to the plot - so IF is toying with the idea of stopping by plotting Bond's demise...

SW: write from the point of view of someone in the catering office of the volcano lair in YOLT

RP: relates the drinking to that in Mad Men

And the timings fit: Bond, eg You Only Live Twice in Aug 1962 and Mad Men, series 2, in 1962. Imagine Bond as an ten-years-older Don Draper missing meetings, fretting about the missile-crisis era, drinking himself to death, slumped in the stalls of the executive floor toilet...

AL's biographic scoop was the revelation of IF's sado-masochistic whipping. 

AL: some say "M" is Mother 

Although Lycett sounds unconvinced of that, it perhaps chimes with the thread of sado-aberrant sexuality running through the books: sadism passim, what appear to be faint hints of homosexuality here and there, and the curious fact that all of the girls he really wants he can't keep.

Related: All that is solid melts into lair, The name's Bourne, Jason, Bourne, Jason, Bond, James, Bourne, I'm not angry.