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29 October 2010
24 October 2010
New Pastoralism
Curious bit of a ruminative spiel from artist Anthony Gormley, stumbled upon in a back issue of Conservation Bulletin from 2007. In a short piece titled "the Post-Industrial Sublime," Gromley offers:
"I can remember as a schoolboy walking northeast over the North Yorkshire Moors beyond Pickering and first seeing the Fylingdales early warning station -- three huge balls, alien objects in an open, windswept, heatherland with few paths and roads. They were blindingly white, interestingly indented and changed the landscape and the way one felt in it completely.
The post-war landscape of Britain has been transformed by three things: the motorway (with the concomitant loss of railways), the high-rise tower and the decline of manufacturing and the arrival of the megashed. You could also argue that the way we perceive and engage with the land has also changed -- fewer of us work with and in it, the land becoming something to be passed through, most usually in a car, where we are inoculated from direct contact by speed and steel. In the English picturesque, a landscape worthy of being painted had to have some aspect of the sublime (the untamed meeting the ordered) and an absence of evidence of work. It was considered important to have a ruin, castle or monument to help see it in a poetic way. Today we have escaped the 18th century’s decorum, but we still look on the land in remarkably historic ways. I would suggest that the network of motorways is our most potent unconscious monument and it, rather than the park, determines the way that we relate to the landscape of this dear overcrowded group of islands that we call home. I would suggest it is the hidden workings of the structures that we see from these motorways that have become at once the Gothic ruins and the elements of Burkian terror in our sublime, and that give our prospects their sense of beauty."
From there, Gormley takes the reader through a breif travelogue of the new English countryside -- one that includes the glories of the M1 motorway, the Drax power station, the field of towering radio ariels in Rugby and the "exhilarating Emsley Moor transmitter," etc.
Fair enough, I suppose; even if it isn't the most novel way of framing the topic. As a tour of "new monuments," the article's free of any sort of Warholian irony, and lacking in anything akin to Robert Smithson's perverse critical eccentricities. In the end, it' comes across as a bit vapid. Perhaps that latter suspicion is most hammered home when, in the final paragraphs, it appears that the entire article is a triumphalist bit of self-promotion for the artist's own "Angel of the North."
Full article here.
18 October 2010
Remnants
I guess this makes for another installment of "The Ubiquity of Floral Wallpaper in the Former East Germany." This time, some selections from Martin Roemers's recent series Relics of the Cold War.
17 October 2010
Yo, Ozymandias!...
"Rome's got ruins. Athens's got ruins. Ours are bigger."
"Not since the last days of the Maya..."
"...Together they set off on the highway of the future, ...and drove it to the end of the line."
Ugch. Perhaps someone should've stuck to making music videos.If the opening montage sequence isn't enough to tip you off, this BBC doco by Julien Temple from earlier this year bears a distinct whiff of ham-handedness about it -- sensationalist, somewhat exploitative, playing to a diffuse and contradictory mesh of received myths and prejudices. For some reason, the old comedic line about the guy who "managed to grab hold of the wrong end of the stick and then used it to beat around the bush" comes naggingly to mind. As do some of Stephen Marche's recent comments on Oliver Stone, especially his barb about "intellectual laziness leavened...with casual irresponsibility."
Perhaps the most damning rejoinder from one Youtube viewer is: "Too much Eninem." But more to the point are those that point out that the thing is wildly one-sided and unnuanced, and suffers a deficit of academic input. Part of the problem might be that Temple is a bit late jumping on the bandwagon of a particular pop-culture trend/meme.
More thoughts on this later.
14 October 2010
Ear-Deep in Ersatz
Table of Contents
1 Feedback Song
2 Girls Don't Count
3 Autumn Leaves
4 Black Mask
5 In My Lifetime
6 Abbagal, and Sleep Fantasy Dreams
7 Another Reason
8 The Hollow Men
9 Forced Laugh
10 We Are Time
11 Mary's Operation
12 Health & Efficiency
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
Sometimes the sound of collapse and things falling apart makes absolute sense. It certainly did then. ("Ahhh...verité, at last.") Of course, the culture was far more mono- in those days. "Mono" as in -lithic, monopolizing all of the discursive channels and crowding most everything else out of the room. Finding something that might've actually meant or said something to you wasn't so easily done and required diligence on the part of the hungry and the bored.
At any rate...
High school music -- mine, anwyay. Ugh, was I ever so young? Most people's taste in music during those formative years largely sucks, anyway; and I'm certain that I was no exception in that respect. But I guess it beat listening to REO Speedwagon.
Still, it's stuff that undoubtedly warped my aesthetic sensibilities for life. The vintage here mostly being (I think) between 1979-1983, with the selection including what might seem to some like obvious choices.
As before: Short shelf-life on the active link.
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