...Not with a bang but a shrug.

"I’m ever reluctant to take our predictive narratives totally seriously because I think that in spite of our best efforts at prediction, I think that our self-regard defeats us in the end. That we tend to—we imagine relatively heroic outcomes, and no one wants a prophet standing on the corner saying that everything is going to be hideously stupid and banal. Utterly atrocious, and that’s just the nature of things. It lacks even the—well, the appeal of the apocalypse is closure and a sort of clarity. Yes! The world is ending. And yeah it’s kind of a banner one can get behind, in a way. Its opposite is this kind of willy-nilly nihilistic absurdist narrative that one can feel one is living in."

- William Gibson, interviewed at LitHub

Yes, I've Been Away

But reason enough to finally poke my head up is to pass long that that Mount Maxwell Radio has posted a new podcast mix. Music and miscellaneous audio, amounting to fifty-two minutes of hauntological hypnagogia, as transmitted from the scenic shores of Vancouver Island, British Columbia.

Unbuilding, II

Returning again to the matter of ruins, there's the current exhibition at the Tate in London, titled "Ruin Lust." One of the exhibition's main curators is Brian Dillon, who's written a number of essays about the aesthetics of ruination in recent years. In fact, the Tate exhibit could be considered a straggling offshoot of an anthology on the topic that he edited for the Whitechapel Gallery's "Documents of Contemporary Art" series a few years ago.

The exhibition takes its name from the German term Ruinenlust, which hails back to the years of German Romanticism back in the late 18th century. In keeping with that Romanticist theme, the exhibit features works by Piranesi, Turner, Constable, and the like. From the looks of it, the selection is overwhelming drawn from the Tate's own collection -- including an assortment of works that include pieces by Paul Nash, Graham Sutherland, John Latham, and a later, seldom-seen piece by Eduardo Paolozzi. Then there's the allotment by the most contemporary artists of the bunch including Keith Arnatt, and John Stezaker. Here we get a sense of the thematic thrust of the exhibit -- what is the sense of ruination that we have now, the sort that seems to too frequently emanate from our immediate surroundings? There's a great deal of recent work to illustrate this theme, be it the photographs that writer Jon Savage took around London over the course of two decades, Rachel Whiteread's photographs of tower blocks, Laura Oldfield Ford's drawings of housing estates, or David Shrigley's grimly sarcastic "Leisure Center."

With these examples, the exhibit zags into more charged territory, into the politics of space (public, domestic, etc.) in the contemporary built environment -- the anomie that too-commonly results from both well-intentioned civic pragmatism or the vagaries of rampantly haphazard real-estate speculation. Whichever the case, each included gives off a foreboding impression, if only because there isn't a human figure to be found in any of them. It's like a neutron-bomb school of urban development, reflective of the estrangement that results in a societal environ predicated on the logics of perpetual, unbroken progress, innovation, and "creative destruction." On this matter, one could turn to Dillon's Whitechapel anthology and find an excerpt from Mark Lewis's 2006 essay "Is Modernism Our Antiquity?", in which the author muses:

"The idea of a modernist ruin in the making, while compellingly seductive, seems depressingly elegiac and tautological at best. Didn't the images and forms of modernism have ruin, decay and obsolescence written into them? Was this not meant to serve as an inbuilt apotropaic function, all the better to protect against the future romantic appeal of their ruining? And do I really want to male an elegy to something like 'modernism's forgotten promise'? There's the rub. For today it is fundamentally a question of what is to be done as the artistic signs and images of emerging and developing modernity are rapidly becoming historical."

Lewis's rumination are, by his own acknowledgment, prompted by Bruno Latour's We Have Never Been Modern, in which Latour argued that modernism was a paradox to begin with -- an a priori double-bind, like a blueprint with the terms of its own abandonment and demolition included as a preconditional contractor's clause.

Also included are excerpts from Jane and Louise Wilson's Sealander, their series of photographs of derelict WWII Nazi bunkers littered along the coastline of Normandy. The Wilsons have repeatedly dealt in this type of subject of the years -- ominous remnants of the Cold War era like underground military nuclear missile facilities, the East Berlin Stasi archives, and the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazahkstan. The Sealander series of course follows after theorist Paul Virilio's Bunker Archeology, his book of photographs of the very same bunkers; his own taken in the late 1950s and early 1960s, after he came across the structures while roaming the beaches of Northern France. In the accompanying texts, Virilio passingly compares the bunkers and the modernist functional architectural forms of Le Corbusier and Brutalism, but asserts that as structures their utility was the product of another logic altogether -- that belonging to the culture of total war. At one point he writes:

"Anachronistic in normal periods, in peacetime, the bunker appears as a survival machine, as a shipwrecked submarine on a beach. It speaks to us of other elements, of terrific atmospheric pressure, of an unusual world in which science and technology have developed the possibility of final disintegration. If the bunker can be compared to a milestone, to a stele, it is not so much for its system of inscriptions as it is for its position, its configuration of materials and accessories: periscopes, screens, filters, etc. The monolith does not aim to survive down through the centuries; the thickness of its walls translates only the probable power of impact in the instant of assault. The cohesion of the material corresponds here to the immateriality of the new war environment; in fact, matter only survives with difficulty in a world of continuous upheaval. The landscape of contemporary war is that of a hurricane projecting and dispersing, dissipating and disintegrating through fusion and fission as it goes along."

At another:

"The immensity of this project was what defies common sense: total war was revealed here in its mythic dimensions. ...A long history was curled up here. These concrete blocks were indeed the final throw-offs of the history of frontiers, from the Roman limes to the Great Wall of China; the bunkers, as ultimate military surface structure, had shipwrecked at lands' limits, at the precise moment of the sky's arrival in war; they marked off the horizontal littoral, the continental limit. History had changed course one final time before jumping into the immensity of aerial space."

Curiously, the exhibit has its own set of accompanying workshops, the last of which is "The Unofficial Countryside," which focuses on "the modern edgelands that ring our cities and soft corners of the countryside," under the premise of asking "Industrial brownfields, landfills, suburbs: Are these the ruins of our modern age?" In the exhibition, this examination of terrain vague is exemplified by images from Keth Arnatt's landscape series A.O.N.B.(Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty); and by excerpts from Paul Graham's Troubled Land, his collection of photos taken throughout Northern Ireland in the 1980s.

Ruin Lust is also rounded out by selection of Tacita Dean's past work, and by the curious inclusion of a re-anacted version of Gerard Byrne's 1984 and Beyond -- a 3-channel video re-enactment modeled after an 1963 Playboy magazine roundtable discussion with Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Heinlein and eight other science-fiction authors, in which the participants were asked to give their speculative thoughts on what the future would be like.


* * * *

Speculative futures, ruination and entropy, terrain vague -- these things were a constant source of fascination and inspiration for both author J. G. Ballard and the artist Robert Smithson. It was this that provided the focus for Tacita Dean's recent film project JG. In a way, the film is reflective of a sort of aesthetic love triangle. Dean has long been inspired by the work of Smithson and Ballard. In turn, Ballard wrote admiringly of Dean's work (especially her texts). Smithson was an avid reader of science fiction, and was particularly taken with Ballard's work, which proved a huge influence on the artist in the mid-late 1960s. And Ballard was quite taken with Smithson's earthworks, no doubt recognizing that he and Smithson shared similar interests and ideas.

In a write-up of the film at the East of Borneo site, contributor Rachel Valinsky fleetingly references a tertiary text by Ballard titled "Robert Smithson as Cargo Cultist." Not having encountered the Ballard piece before, I do a quick scramble to locate it. It's a short piece, only some 7-8 paragraphs long, the last portion of which reads:

"Fifty thousands years from now our descendants will be mystified by the empty swimming pools of an abandoned southern California and Cote d’Azur, lying in the dust like primitive time machines or the altar of some geometry obsessed religion. I see Smithson’s monuments belonging in the same category, artefacts intended to serve as machines that will suddenly switch themselves on and begin to generate a more complex time and space. All his structures seem to be analogues of advanced neurological processes that have yet to articulate themselves.

:Reading Smithson’s vivid writings, I feel he sensed all this. As he stands on the Spiral Jetty he resembles Daedalus inspecting the ground plan of the labyrinth, working out the freight capacity of his cargo terminal, to be measured in the units of a neurological deep time. He seems unsure whether the cargo has been delivered.

"His last flight fits into the myth, though for reasons of his own he chose the wrong runway, meeting the fate intended for his son. But his monuments endure in our minds, the ground plans of heroic psychological edifices that will one day erect themselves and whose shadows we can already see from the corners of our eyes."

It seems the Ballard piece in question has rarely been reprinted, but the full text of it can be read here.

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.

Futures Past

— It’s not the best app, but I don’t think there’s a better one.  

— It’s a good idea, just the interface doesn’t work. 

— Uh dudes, are the shuttles leaving us here? 

— Try finger-swiping that one part. No, the other.

* * * * *

The above via Hate the Future. Sheer serendipity bumping into it now. Partly because it was originally posted before the recent spasm of gadget-related schadenfreude. But also because a local arts theater has been having a Kubrick month, and this past weekend I joined some friends for a matinee screening of 2001. I had seen the film on the large screen once before, or sort-of seen it. I was 11 at the time, when the thing was making the rounds of theaters in advance of the 10-year anniversary of its initial release. Being a bit too young for it and due to its pacing, I ended dozing off through the better stretch of its latter half, only being finally blasted awake by Ligeti's "Atmospheres" toward the end. And yeah, despite having no idea what I'd just watched, my mind was still blown.

Seeing it again was a reminder of what viewing any Kubrick would demonstrate: That despite his overall unevenness and deficiencies in certain areas, Kubrick was a consummate craftsman and technician, relentless work toward getting a film to look exactly as he wanted it. I was quite impressed with the "Dawn of Man" opening sequence of incidental establishing shots of the veldt. I was also reminded of how for the past four years I've been expected Apple to broker some deal with Kubrick's estate so that they can use this sequence for a rollout of a model of the iPhone...

It'll happen eventually, just you wait.

On Location: Re-Placement

When Orson Welles set about making his 1962 film adaptation of Franz Kafka's The Trial, he had originally wanted to shoot the film in Prague. Unable to gain permission to do so, his default location then became the city of Zagreb, which became the site for many of the film's outdoor sequences with a majority of the interior scenes being shot in various locations around Paris.

The decision to shoot in Paris was itself an 11th-hour default decision on Welles's part, when he found out that the sets being built in Zagreb were far behind schedule and wouldn't be ready in time for he and his crew's arrival. I'll admit that it's been many years since I've seen the film, but as I recall the differences between the two shooting locations ended up casting a strange, somewhat surreally disorienting feel throughout the film -- a disjointedness as scenes shift from exterior to interior spaces, the starkly modern architecture of Zagreb contrasting with the dark Parisian interiors, a fair number of which dated back to the 19th century. One could argue that this effect ended up improving the film, complementing and heightening the absurdist qualities of Kafka's narrative.

Which brings us to the images above, which are by Croatian artist David Maljkovic and taken from his 2010 series Recalling Frames. The series consists of photomontages made up of Maljkovic's own photos of various locations in the city of Zagreb as they look today, overlying and intercut with images of these same locations as they appeared in scenes from Welles's The Trial.

Looking over the artist's past work, there appears to be heavy hauntological thematic thread running throughout -- a varied sequence of revisitations to the past. More specifically, Maljkovic seems fascinated with the former Yugoslavia as it existed in its Tito years, back when the nation's Communist leadership promoted and pursued a progressively modern(ist) vision of the future. In that respect, a fair amount of Maljkovic's work could be considered as being the product of what's been labeled "Yugonostalgia," a cultural phenomenon of recent years running concurrent with the similar Ostalgie sensibility in parts of former East Germany.

In an article for the Guardian, Maljkovic explained some of the ideas that inspired the series. In particular, he spoke of the role of the state in the former SFRY, of how many of the buildings depicted in the film had been allowed to fall into disrepair as the present government of Croatia seeks to position itself at a distant end of the political spectrum from its Communist past. Maljkovic bemoans the fate of some of these architectural remnants and of the forward-thinking social initiatives that they signified. "Our heritage is disappearing," he says at the article's end.

That last assertion is problematic in a number of ways, some of which I won't go into. But mainly its the way it invokes a particular history -- particularly one pried free of its context. Firstly, there's the consideration that the history in question wasn't exclusively the product of socialistic, state-backed initiatives. The architectural modernization of major metropoles was common in the post-war era, often the result of the positivistic, progress-oriented mentality of the Modernist era as a whole.¹  But of course those very same initiatives were doubtlessly perceived as being themselves destructive of certain histories. Ultimately, it begs the question of whose idea of heritage.²

Images: Recalling Frames installation,  [center] just another day at the office,  Tony Perkins 

in The Trial from a scene filmed on the grounds of the Zagreb trade fair, and [bottom] 

Giuseppe Sambito's Italian Pavilion  at the Zagreb trade fair, c. 1961

Maljkovic's choice of the word heritage is, however, pretty poignant in this instance. The notion of heritage was something of a cornerstone in academic studies on the nature of cultural nostalgia. I'm reminded of Malcolm Chase and Christopher Shaw's "The Dimension of Nostalgia," and their observation that "Nostalgia becomes possible at the same time as utopia. The counterpart of the imaged future is the imagined past." In that 1989 essay, Chase and Shaw explore the matter of nostalaia and the ways that it connects with ideas of heritage and invocations of the past. They write at one point:

"Tradition may be the most important encounter that non-historians have with what passes for history. The past is represented in their present through activities and practices, through ritual and ceremony, and through ideals and beliefs. Whether we consider the rites of passage in life of an individual, or of the public pomp of state ceremonial, traditions are represented as the means by which our own lives are connected with the past. Tradition is the enactment and dramatisation of tradition; it is the thread which binds our separate lives to the broad canvas of history."

[Raymond] Williams teases out one of the difficulties: 'It only takes two generations to make anything traditional...But the word moves again and again toward age-old and toward ceremony, duty and respect.' These two things...link the concept with nostalgia. For if tradition is a kind of substitute for history, the past can be mobilised and articulated to provide easy and comfortable answers in the present."

At any rate, returning to the hauntological aspect of the series: In the Guardian piece, the tone of baleful nostalgia is compounded by the artist's discussion on how he went about making the series, with Maljkovic offering a description of the technical aspects of its creation:

"I took photographs of the original film frames, and then went to the same location and took another picture from the same angle. Then I put the two negatives together, and produced another photograph. It was a complex process. No labs for processing film exist any more – the craft is dead – so I did everything myself. I constructed a lab in my studio and developed the pictures by hand. It would have been easy to do it all in Photoshop, but then the end result would have a completely different feeling. I don't want to say this is better, as each medium has its own merits, but this way worked."

Which amounts to something more than the usual analog-versus-digital polemic. Rather it seems to complete the litany of laments and underlying tropes so common in recent the cultural trend of fetishizing ruination and abandonment -- the recurrent themes of entropy, "creative destruction," and obsolescence in the telos of technological progress and late-capitalist evolution, the séancing of all that which has been lost in the face of pervasive uncertainty about the worth of what has been gained (if, in fact, much of anything of tangible or lasting value has been gained at all). Which in the end prompts me to recall a remark made by Susan Sontag in her essay "Melancholy Objects," her off-handed comment that perhaps "the true modernism is not austerity but a garbage-strewn plentitude." Maybe. Or maybe, instead, both at the same time.


_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

1.   Yes, in some cases these initiatives were very much political and institutional in origin and intent, devised as the architectural embodiments of certain postwar social-democratic/"welfare state" civic policies. One might cite the modernization of certain portions of Stockholm during the 1950s and 1960s as an example, or the emergence of Brutalist architecture in the UK during those same years. Yet as the architectural history of the U.S. in that same era indicates, such stuff ultimately had more to do with the notion of modernization itself, and was hardly the exclusive product any specific political ideology.

2.   In this case it's an especially slippery matter when you account for the fact that Maljkovic's work often invokes a period that predates the artist's own birth -- sometimes by a full decade or more.

Things as They Are (Reprise)

One of the first seminars, if not the first, I took when I started grad school back in the mid '90s was on devoted to "Art of 1970s." The instructor was a British expat who was widely regarded as an authority on all things Fluxus and who over the years had made frequent excursion across the water to participate in various Neoist events and "apartment festivals." One of the things he warned us about at the start was that any research we did in the course of the seminar would most likely involve primary research, since the art of the decade in question had (at that point) suffered from a comprehensive degree of art-historical and -critical neglect.

At any rate, at the beginning of the seminar he gave as a quick grounding in the state of things back in 1970, in the days when the artworld was transitioning out of the culturally transformative days of the 1960s. One of the things he chose to focus on was FOOD, the lower Manhattan co-op kitchen and restaurant founded by artist Gordon Matta-Clark and his wife and a bunch of their friends in 1971.

As he told us about the collaborative effort that went into the place and how it served as a anchor and hub for the proto-Soho art community of its day, some of the students expressed amazement. How did they manage to do it, one of them asked, how could they find the resources to put such a thing together?

"You have to remember that the economy was different then," the instructor told us. "And New York was in bad shape at the time, so rents and real estate in many parts of the city were quite cheap."

"But, no," the student insisted, "How did they find the time?"

"We all had a lot more time in those days," he responded. "Seemed like everyone did. Thing is, we thought that that was how things were going to be from there on out. That thanks to automation and whatnot, we would all have the time to pursue all sort of creative or constructive things of that sort."

"But...what happened to all of that?"

"I don't know,' he replied, looking genuinely flummoxed by the question. "All I can say is that none of us ever imagined that in the future we'd all have to work so damned hard."

* * * *
Which brings me to the following somethings. Here's David Graeber, via the latest edition of The Baffler, on why it is you never got that rocket pack and/or hover car....

"Why did the projected explosion of technological growth everyone was expecting—the moon bases, the robot factories—fail to happen? There are two possibilities. Either our expectations about the pace of technological change were unrealistic (in which case, we need to know why so many intelligent people believed they were not) or our expectations were not unrealistic (in which case, we need to know what happened to derail so many credible ideas and prospects)."

A number of dubious or debatable assertions made throughout, a number of things that beg for qualification; but it makes for a thumping good, enthralling read nonetheless. It also contains perhaps to most concise and compact dismissal of Alvin Toffler I've come across; which may or may not be such a major feat since I imagine Toffler's a pretty easy target. Still, as Graeber asserts, Toffler's not so insignificant as all that given the Newt Gengrich/neocon thinktank association. Then there's this lengthy interview with Graeber over at Bookforum, in which by way of cross-reference we see that Toffler and Fredric Jameson had something in common, that being the debt that each owed to Ernest Mandel.

One of the core assertions that Graeber makes in the Baffler piece gets echoed in the Bookforum interview, phrased differently, and dovetailing into an illustrative personal anecdote...

"Over the course of twelve years of activism, I’ve come to realize that whoever is running this system is obsessed with winning the conceptual war—much more so, in fact, than with actual economic viability. Given the choice between an option that makes capitalism seem like the only possible system and an option that actually makes capitalism a more viable long-term system, they always choose the former.

Oddly enough, I first picked up on this in an activist context. It was 2002, and we went to the IMF meetings [in Washington]. And we were scared, because it was right after 9/11. Sure enough, they overwhelmed us with police and endless security. Considering our numbers, it was shocking that they would devote all of these resources to containing us. And we all went home feeling pretty depressed. It was only later that I learned how profoundly we’d disrupted things. The IMF actually held some of their meetings via teleconference because of the security risk we ostensibly posed. All the parties were canceled. Basically, the police shut down the meetings for us. I realized that the fact that three hundred anarchists go home depressed seems much more important to them than whether the IMF meetings actually happened. That was a revelation. As the whole thing falls apart in front of us, the one battle they’ve won is over the imagination."

Dancing About Architecture, IV: 'Rather Than for a Real World'

Brasília under construction, photos by Marcel Gautherot. Via.

The Atlantic article (see link) and its pull-quote from Simone de Beauvoir prompt me to return to my copy of Robert Hughes's The Shock of the New, for the three paragraphs he devotes to Brasília.* In which planner Lucio Costa is also called out on the carpet for Supreme Malconceptualism. Hughes's verdict echoes that of Beauvoir:

"Brasília, as this place was named, was going to be the City of the Future -- the triumph of sunlight, reason, and the automobile. It would show what the International Style could o when backed by limitless supplies of cash and national pride. ...In the future, everyone would have a car and so the car, as in Corbusier's dreams, would abolish the street. This was carried out to the letter in Brasília, which has many miles of multi-lane highways, with scarcely any footpaths or pavements. By design, the pedestrian is an irrelevance -- a majority irrelevance, however, since only one person in eight there owns a car or has access to a car and, Brazil being Brazil, the public transport system is wretched. So the freeways are empty most of the day, except at peak hours, when all the cars in Brasília briefly jam them at the very moment when the rest of the working population is trying, without the benefit of of pedestrian crossings or underpasses, to get across the road to work."

Which makes me recall an musical item I used to own. Back in the late '90s, the label Caipirinha briefly did a short-run "Architecttura" series of releases of experimental musicians doing compositions that were thematically linked to certain works of architecture. For instance, David Toop doing Itsuko Hasegawa's Museum of Fruit (Yamanashi, Japan). But I recall Panacea's contribution to the series involved a homage to Niemeyer's Brasília. On which the artist completely ditched ditched his trademark drum'n'bass/quasi-gabber rhythms, instead opting for downtempo or beatless soundscapes that are often as cold and airlessly spatial and inhuman as Costa's city planning. An envisioned utopian as a synthetic dystopia. One sample from the thing ...

:: Panacea - "Void of Safety"

But that's just the atmosphere of the thing. I recall finding much of thing (musically) too angular, and not particularly bringing to mind the more curvilinear and organic aspects of many of Niemeyer's buildings. Much of it, somewhat appealingly, had a very depopulated and nocturnal vibe about it, as well.

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

* Yes, I've been known to read Robert Hughes from time to time; despite the fact that he's so "conservative" and that I often disagree with him about on almost everything that's transpired since 1950. And I mainly like him because he's often, in the strictly technical sense, an impeccable and eloquent writer. Which helps, especially seeing how -- when it comes to architecture in particular -- he can often be a shameless hack, merely rephrasing the ossified & honored verdict or what other critics had long since decreed. Which (for example) has everything to do with his verdict on Pruitt-Igoe so rotely follows that of Charles Jencks, and which is probably why his remarks on Brasília shadow those of Beauvoir.

Apathy for the Devil

More outboard riffage. This time a ballooning trio of posts spanning three decades, skipping across a few cultish excursions into "pop satire" and lots of rubbernecking along the road to nowhere. With the Residents, Shockabilly, and Destroy All Monsters driving the tour bus...

::   Part 1 ::   Part 2 ::   Part 3

I suppose there's a number of tropes that tie this tryptic together which I chose not to go into...a simmering anger that provides a thematic undertow yet never voices itself directly (all that deflecting and effacement via pomo irony & whatnot). Stuff that always struck me like it's trying to summon and expel ghosts with the same hand. All of it with a very definite bleakness and desolation undergirding, no matter how "busy" it might've sometimes sounded on the surface.

Unmediated

In the course of Simon's NYT yarn this past weekend on the topic of "atemporality" in contempo pop, he mentions something that reminded me of something that I recently stumbled across, and which touches -- somewhat tangentially -- on a matter I was riffing on earlier. Simon mentions the matter of "dead media," a term that he attributes to Bruce Sterling, who originally proposed the compiling of a collaborative Dead Media Handbook back in the latter half of the 1990s.

Which probably explains this item I encountered a few months ago: the Dead Media Archive, a wiki created in conjunction with a class taught at NYU's Department of Media, Culture, and Communications.

Even with its list of criterial qualifiers, the archive sports an odd array of entries, with a broad and almost random sampling of topics falling under its thematic canopy. As such, it makes for interesting reading. Sure, 8-tracks and Smell-O-Vision and town criers are all there, as well as a number of other obvious entries. For instance, I was previously unfamiliar with roentgenizdat dubplates (or "bone records") of post-WWII Soviet vintage. Of the more literal hauntological persuasion, there's an article on EVP, which provides a some deep background information about the Spiritualist Movement, "spirit photography," research into paranormal phenomenon, before finally winding down with a citation of Slayer's Hell Awaits. There's a long article on "dirty media," where the author very pointedly refutes the idea of "immaterial labor" and lengthily discusses the ecological side-effects of e-waste. There's a truly odd (as in esoterically incongruous) art history piece on "absorption" in 18th-century painting a la Michael Fried's writings on the topic, one of underground missile silos as relics of the Cold War, as well as a theoretical post-mortem on the concept of "terra incognita."

There are no shortage of gadgets and such that turn up on the thing, from the Tamagotchi to the Nintendo Virtual Boy. Of course, this is straying on well-trodden turf since there are numerous sites elsewhere for such stuff -- for outdated computer systems, video games, and vintage recording technology or whatever, usually collected and compiled by enthusiasts. More rewarding, perhaps, are the dossiers that venture into more conceptual and theoretical terrain. And there's a listing for proposed dossiers, which includes such random and speculative entries as: barcodes, canon, depondent verbs [sic], elevator attendants, errata, myriorama, the photographic gun, the subjunctive mood, truth, and the 8-hour work day.

The archive appears to be a salvage job from the original Dead Media Project mailing list, supplemented by student entries. The field notes from the original project are extensive, but focus primarily of a literal application of Sterling's idea, never venturing off into more theoretical or conceptual arcs. Between the versions, its intriguing to think of where such a project could go if it had some editorial guidance and a strong and varied set of contributors.





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Having just tapped out the above, another belated connection comes to mind. The author Ander Monson wrote one of my favorite books of recent years, Other Electricities. Based on Monson's own childhood years growing up in a samll town in the uppermost frozen reaches of Michigan's Upper Penisula, it's a very bleak yet beautiful book that harbors its share of ghosts (technological and otherwise). At any rate, the town where Monson grew up had previously built around copper mining, but when the price of copper declined so much that it wasn't worth the expense of extraction, the mining companies abandoned the place and the town reputedly became a dim shadow of its former self. Perhaps its for this reason that Monson carries a lifelong fascination with the discarded, the diminished, and the obsolete; since these are the things that have provided topics for a number of his essays and poems. Monson's prose poem/essay "Failure: Another Iteration" mentioned Sterling's Dead Media Project, as well as the online Museum of E-Failure (which seems to have, ironically enough, been offline for some years now). Then there's his essay "Solipsism," which more or less deals with the technological relic of the typewriter (as well as pointed toward his more recently obsession with the "unstable I" of the first-person narrative and the contempo boom in "memoir lit").

Dancing About Architecture, II: Endlos Haus

Amusing. As the press release has it...

"An obelisk of noise that rose rudely above the treetops of the Bialowieska Forest, the Endless House project shone for a mere six weeks in the spring of 1973. The outlandish brainchild of wealthy audiophile/maniac Jiri Kantor, its stated mission was 'to become the cradle of a new European sonic community... a multimedia discotheque' that should 'surprise and delight' artists and dancers alike. ...The brilliant Czech may have made his millions as the midas-touched entrepreneur/taste-maker behind Paris-based magazine Otium International, but Endless House was always a vanity project as irredeemably vain as its maker..."

As Simon points out, this appears to be the latest in a series of a certain type of high-concept hoax -- the sort that involves crafty marketing campaigns built around the invented legacies of "lost" artists. Judging from the video, it looks like the architectural component was inspired by the sort of "visionary" utopianist schools that flourished during Modernism's waning days in the late 1960s and early 1970s. mostly inspired by the work of the Viennese Haus-Rucker-Co firm....












Haus-Rucker-Co were reputedly inspired by the S.I. and its theories on "play" in relation to psychogeographics, which had partially evolved out of Constant Nieuwenhuys's notions of "unitary urbanism" and his proposed New Babylon, a mutable urban environment to be peopled by a nomadic populace of "homo ludens"...















All of which points back to the "polydimensional" Endless House designed by Frederick Kiesler in 1950...




As it turns out, the specific image that's been circulating in connection with the Endless House compilation is actually of the Klein Bottle House in Australia. As far as the music on the thing is concerned, it's appropriately reminiscent of German e-music circa the early-mid 'seventies. Not sure who exactly is responsible, but I'm assuming it was created by affiliates of the Dramatic label performing under various assumed names. For the curious, 20JFG provides some additional samples here and here.