Habitat, no. 12

From the looks of it, the architecture in Ben Wheatley’s film adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s High-Rise doesn’t much reflect that of the novel’s Brutalist-era 1970s setting. But in an interview from latest Creative Review, designers Michael Eaton and Felicity Hickson talk about how pulled from a variety of Retro- stylistic sources to give the film a particular type of unified atmosphere in terms of graphics and typography:

CR: What research do you do for a film like this, set in the recent past?

ME: It was a really fun one – from a design point of view, everything just looked so cool from that time. ...We had fonts on the office wall that Ben and Mark Tildesley, the production designer, liked – certain things would have their own font; the high rise itself, the supermarket and everything had a sort of ‘brand’ within the building. So from the start, you were aware of how you could stick to a certain aesthetic.

...We realised when we saw the shelves just how much it would take to fill the space. We looked at references for that – Andreas Gursky’s shots of supermarkets with loads of repeats of the same packaging, that was the starting point. We also looked at old images of phone books, any kind of instructional manual, toy kits.

We looked at covers of things, such as Penguin books and magazines. Also, the buyers on the film would be out buying props and every so often they’d come in with, say, a box of comics, or TV guides from the 70s. So we had all this great stuff lying around the office we could look through.

CR: [The products seen in the supermarket set] have the feel of Sainsbury’s own-brand packaging from the 1960s and 70s.

FH: They’re brilliant, I love the simplicity of the designs, they say a lot about the period and the quality of available printing methods at the time.

CR: Were you asked to reflect some of the more ‘atmospheric’ aspects of the film – its oppressive air etc – or was it more about reflecting a time?

FH: Both really. The ‘oppressiveness’ was in the fact that the products were pretty standard and generic designs that were quite quickly produced. I guess if everyone [in the block] has got the same thing, then that helps the feel of that era – and particularly what Ben was trying to create in that building.

I hadn’t realized that the film’s official site has a splash page meant to look like that of the architecture firm from the novel. And was also unaware that the idea for a film adaptation had been kicked around since shortly after the book’s publication back in 1975, with Nicolas Roeg being the first director in line for the job.

After a Fashion

In which the lede bluntly states what is elementary for some people (but perhaps not to others):

“Though we might try to frame it in more rational, objective terms, design culture is really nothing more than a highly complex, super-developed system of driven-by-object fetishism. It's a world where objects take on meanings and significances far beyond the sum of their material form. Where things inert and external to us resonate deep within our psyche. As designer or consumer, we are drawn towards sensations – the sheen of a particular texture, a particular colourway, the way a particular door swings. We've all had it, that moment when we feel a desperate attraction to a thing, an uncontrollable desire for...it, whatever that 'it' might be.”

From Sam Jacob, he of the UIC architecture department and the Strange Harvest blog, with a cheeky opin piece for Dezeen, in which he argues that designers could learn a thing or two from BDSM culture.

There was, if I recall, a fair amount of fetishism lurking beneath the surface of Roland Barthes's The Fashion System. Within months of its publication in 1968, Jean Baudrillard made his debut with The System of Objects, in which he extended Barthes’s semiotics (and fetishism) to a broader critique of postwar consumer culture. For example:

“There was a long period during which American cars were adorned by immense tail fins. For Vance Packard these perfectly symbolized the American obsession with consumer goods. They have other meanings, too: scarcely had it emancipated itself from the forms of earlier kinds of vehicles than the automobile-object began connoting nothing more than the result so achieved – that is to say, nothing more than itself as a victorious function. We thus witnessed a veritable triumphalism on the part of the object: the car’s fins became the sign of victory over space – and they were purely a sign, because they bore no direct relationship to that victory (indeed, if anything they ran counter to it, tending as they did to make vehicles both heavier and more cumbersome). Concrete technical mobility was over-signified here as absolute fluidity. Tail fins were a sign not of real speed but of a sublime, measureless speed. They suggested a miraculous automatism, a sort of grace. It was the presence of these fins that in our imagination propelled the car, which, thanks to them, seemed to fly along of its own accord, after the fashion of a higher organism. The engine was the real efficient principle, the fins the imaginary one. Such interplay between the spontaneous and the transcendent efficacy of the object calls immediately for nature symbols: cars sprout fins and are encased in fuselages – features that in other contexts are functional; first they appropriate the characteristics of the aeroplane, which is a model object relative to space, then they proceed to borrow directly from nature – from sharks, birds, and so on.”

To that, one might add Jameson’s discussion of the “depthlessness” of postmodern culture, as supposedly epitomized in Warhol’s “Diamond Dust Shoes.” Which is one way to look to look at Warhol’s many prints of women’s shoes. Another being that Warhol, by many accounts, also had a major foot fetish.

Image: UK pop sculptor Allen Jones, c. 1969, with one of his “tables.”

New Traditionalists

Or new retromantics, if you like. Teach your children well, and let the youth lead the way. Note the rhetorical interrogative posed as a cultural imperative, giving voice to the conflicted keening of the anxiously aspiring middlebrow set.

Not familiar with "Ob Art," but I'm pretty sure it was never -- y'know -- a thing. Unless it was, in which case it was even more of an invented, next-big-thing-that-wasn't non-thing; kind of like Op Art in the way it made yesterday's homes so different, so appealing for a brief five minutes, but was then even more easily and thankfully forgotten. (And if it never existed, then maybe it's time we invented it; seeing how you can go only so long by running on fumes & the like.)

Circa a 1966 issue of Redbook magazine, apparently, Via here, who via'd it from there.

Discuss.

The Projective Eye

Sam Jacobs at his Strange Harvest blog, in a reprint of his essay "Nostalgia for the New":

"Ironically for something positioning itself on the bleeding edge of newness, the New Aesthetic reeks of something suspiciously like nostalgia. It’s intoxicating vapours contain soothing notes of antiquated art historical ideas including the quaint notion of aesthetic movements and a belief in linear cultural progression. And that’s even before we even get to its content, which to anyone whose been around the cultural block, seem strangely familiar."

The essay originally appeared under the title "The Future as a Historical Fiction" in the UK publication The Commonplace, as part of a discussion on the 'New Aesthetic.' On the same topic and trailing by a few weeks, Curt Cloninger posts his own critique via the Mute site entitled "Manifesto for a Theory of the 'New Aesthetic'," in which he argues:

"'What might things make of the New Aesthetic?' is not a very useful question. 'What might humans make of the New Aesthetic once we realise that we have been entangled with things all along?' is a more useful question. Bruno Latour says that modernism was simply a time when humans thought we weren't entangled with things, when actually we were. What we made of that time unawares was an even bigger entangled mess (Latour's term is ‘a proliferation of hybrids’) – atom bombs as inverted guardian angels, global warming debates as orthodox scientific catechisms. At this point, it seems unlikely that we are going to avoid further complex human/thing entanglements, so trying to avoid them is probably something we should try to avoid. On the other hand, we should also avoid passively sitting around, techno-fetishistically dazzled by these 'spectacular new developments', blithely watching a real-time documentary of ourselves watching a real-time documentary of ourselves. Probably, we should spend some time figuring out how these systems flow and function so we can more effectively modulate them (or sabotage them), hopefully for reasons other than making more money."

"It bears repeating," Cloninger asserts at one point, "'Things' don't affectively suss New Aesthetic images. Only humans 'get' NA images. There is no machine 'aesthetic', no robotic 'vision.'" This has been a common riposte to the buzz surrounding NA over the past several months. Jacobs has his own criticisms, a number of which -- as with the above by Cloninger -- effectively echo those initially voiced by Bruce Sterling in his Wired essay this past April. Which is fitting enough, seeing how in the same edition of The Commonplace, Jacobs's essay runs alongside an interview with Sterling as conducted by editor Jack Self:

I Have Sniffed the Future, and It Smells Like Pittsburgh

Circa 1932:

"When you stand on a hill along the Monongahela River, looking out over miles of steel mills, hundreds of stacks belching flame, you are experiencing an emotion. You may have had the same experience in a chateau in France, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, on the rim of the Grand Canyon, or when looking at a piece of furniture, or even at a fragile wineglass. Likewise, if the sight of the Akron or of Man o' War leading the field down the home stretch excites you, you are reacting to an emotion. When automobiles, railway cars, airships, steamships or other objects of an industrial nature stimulate you in the same way that you are stimulated when you look at the Parthenon, at the windows of Chartres, at the Moses of Michelangelo, or at the frescos of Giotto, you will then have every right to speak of them as works of art.

Just as surely as the artists of the fourteenth century are remembered by their cathedrals, so will those of the twentieth be remembered for their factories and the products of these factories."

From the opening chapter of Norman Bel Geddes's Horizons, reproduced -- with alternated illustrations -- at The Charnel-House. Geddes having been, for the unfamiliar, the designer who would a few year later envision the General Motors-funded "Futurama" exhibition for the 1939 New York World's Fair. Geddes was one who was "of name" back in the day, a definitively forward-thinking designer for his time, a designer of influence during the postwar years. His 1940 publication Magic Motorways is said by some to having influenced the design of what would be implemented as the Interstate Highway System.

Still, the introductory chapter -- including its evocation of an industrial sublime -- is absolutely the most bewildering read I've come across in quite some time; the sort where (or me, anyway) every other sentence drips with so much unintended, retrospective irony that I nearly find myself rolling over with guffaws. Not the least of which is the assertion that the designer would never conscionably lend a hand in designing shoddy goods, never be party to any sort of industry whose bread and butter hinged on narrowing and calculated degrees of planned obsolescence. Or the part where the author offers a casually fantastic revisioning of art history, and by doing so effectively places himself as an equivalent of a Renaissance Man, with his corporate sponsors as the modern-day Medicis. And there's the seventh paragraph, which in some ways almost anticipates some aspects of Warhol by almost 3 decades...

"Until recently artists have been disposed to isolate themselves upon the side of life apart from business; apart from a changing world which, in their opinion, was less sympathetic because its output, in becoming machine-made, was losing its individuality. The few artists who have devoted themselves to industrial design have done so with condescension, regarding it as a surrender to Mammon, a mere source of income to enable them to obtain time for creative work. On the other hand, I was drawn to industry by the great opportunities it offered creatively."

After which follows an extended spiel of self-aggrandizing bombast. Other chapters in the same volume sport the tiles, "Speed -- To-morrow," "New Houses for Old," "Architecture for the Amusement Industry," and "What Price Factory Ugliness?" And while the chapter on speed at least sounds like it might be promising, in the end it winds up being little more than an extended sales pitch for the author's own design for a new class of luxury ocean liner.

Full text of Horizons available via the Archive-org. Plenty other background info on Geddes on the web, but here's an interesting side item courtesy of The Believer.

Collage Culture, Slight Return: Pop Will Delete Itself

Some random favored selections from Deface Value. Many "as found" titles, mostly supplied by the folks at Jive Time Records, but featuring the occasional contribution from the staff of WFMU, Harmony Korine, and graffiti artist Dalek.

And the Billy Joel cover they have in their gallery puts me in mind to add a couple of my own proposed alterations...

Currently Under Construction

Selections from the blog I Collect Soviet Books. The author of which, it appears, has recently come into possession of many copies of U.S.S.R. in Construction. Originally established by the writer Maxim Gorky, the magazine was published throughout the 1930s, and (as you can probably deduce from the spreads above) was part of a state propaganda campaign to promote Stalin's series of Five-Year Plans.

That aside, the magazine was also notable because the publishers called upon many leading Russian photographers and designers of the era to provide and shape content; which at times included El Lissitzky and his wife Sophie Lissitzky-Küppers, as well as the husband-and-wife team of Alexander Rodchenko and Varvara Stepanova. This last fact is more than a little ironic, seeing how a number of these artists were at the forefront of the Constructivist avant-garde movement during the prior years. Ironic, because the publication would also (eventuallY) ecome an instrument for promoting the Kremlin's shifting aesthetic policy under Stalin -- a shift away from "decadent" avant-gardisms such as Constructivism and towards Social Realism as the official art of the Soviet state. John Heartfield also contributed to the magazine during its later years.

Throughout the various issues you see many of the common visual tropes of Russian photography and graphic design (as well as typography) of that era. First there's the low-angle shot -- the heroic framing of the isolated figure (be it a persons, buildings, monument or machine). These often combined and montaged with the wide-angle, aerial views -- meant to depict and convey not only the scope of a huge collective enterprise, but also the scale of the country's efforts toward modernization. And as the author of the I Collect blog notes, there's also the glorification of Soviet expansion into various provinces, as well as the appearance by an occasion figure who would later be airbrushed out of the history books.

Upon further googling, it appears that the University of Saskatchewan has an incomplete collection of the journal, with full credits and PDF scans of each issue that they've obtained. Here's a couple from the fourth issue, as laid out by Rodchenko and Stepanova...

The above are (I presume) from the international edition of the journal, which was printed in a multi-lingual editions. If you run searches on the thing, you find conflicting information as far as the dates and enumeration of issues. It appears that the Russian edition may have featured different topics, covers, etcetera from those printed for audiences outside the Soviet Union. For instance, there's a seventh issue in Russian (dated 193_) devoted to the life and work of poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, also designed by Rodchenko...

Of which there's a gallery of scans for the issue here. There's also several galleries extensively devoted exclusively to the graphics of the publication here if you scroll to the bottom of the page.

Dispatches from the Copyright Wars: Fair (Ab)use

Came across this item some weeks ago and was naturally amused. My brother-in-law had given me Thorne's first book, The Internet is a Playground, for Christmas year before last, and it provided a lot of laughs. But now that I happen to see Thorne's site, it appears that the back-and-forth between the author and his former publisher has continued in recent weeks, offering new twists. And I can't help but be knocked over by the cheeky introduction of this bit...

Which is of course a Banksy reference, which in turn may or may not have been an allusion to the "Joywar" incident that involved visual artist Joy Garnett from about 8 years ago...

...Or is this just projecting/wishful thinking on my part?*


*  Postscript/Update: Might be. As best as I can determine, the Banksy stencil appears to have slightly pre-dated the Garnett episode.