David Barrie

The Cinderella of the Volga

Here's Natalia Vodianova on a recent tour of Russia raising funds - and promoting Nina Ricci - for her charity, the Naked Heart Foundation:

Vodianova's tour manages to grab no less than 22 pages of this month's Vogue: a Versailles Revisited romp through an orgy of fund-raising gigs that includes a 220 ton ice palace and, God help us,

A Slavic Tania Bryer lookalike called Polina Kitsenko paying €90,000 for a privately performed love song by Bryan Adams.

Vodianova's charity is devoted to creating modern parks for less fortunate children in Russia, spreading health and happiness in Natalia's homeland, according to her charity's website.

But not once does Vogue tell you what the organization does other that it somehow relates to children and Vodianova thinks that play is therapeutic.

Over at Vanity Fair, there's a ten or so page spread given over to Madonna to promote her new album:

The piece contains a shockingly pretentious comment on her new documentary on Malawi:

I feel this film was seriously influenced by Godard...He's the one film-maker I was always inspired by...

(Godard would love this - I interviewed him once and he's a total slave to pop.)

Once again, there may be mention of a generic concern for children but the article doesn't give readers the faintest idea what the charity she represents does.

There's something in all of this that says that you can personalize a brand but you can't personalize a cause.

You can attach your name to something: but the media is interested in you, not what you think or hope others will think you're about.

In effect, what may be genuine conviction becomes myth-making, as Vodianova and Madonna harness their image-making credentials and abilities to a cause but can't escape being represented as a brand.

Madonna continues to be Queen of Pseudo Fetish Super Pop.

And for the umpteenth time, Vogue recycles Vodianova as Cinderella.

Vodianova image by Mario Testino. Madonna by Steven Meisel.

Provenance is a luxury item

In a recent edition of Metropolis magazine, Bruce Sterling wrote an article on Slow Food - and took no prisoners:

The upshot is an obscure piece of rural heritage reengineered as a curated service/product in Europe's modern-food heritage industry.

At the centre of Slow, according to Sterling, is a rigorous system of authenticating and anointing  local products like

The Cornish Pilchard. The Chilean Blue Egg Hen. The Cypriot Tsamarella and Bosnian Sack Cheese.

In another part of the ball-park, Lucia van der Post opens an article in the London Financial Times saying:

These days, among sophisticated consumers, provenance counts. Where the fish is caught, how the product is made, whether the makers are properly paid and whether the materials are ethically sourced are no longer just polite questions but real considerations.

Van der Post goes on to extol the virtues of decorative felt rugs that retail up to $10,000, are handmade by nomadic peoples in Kyrgyzstan and fragrantly marketed with Capital Letters as

Unique felt rugs from the Mountains of Heaven.

Once upon a time, there was a heritage industry: today, it's authenticity.

Now authenticity is no bad thing but it does have a habit of converging with business planning for sophisticated  consumers, get smothered in sincerity and it's at times over-liberally sprinkled with words like 'sustainability' and 'democracy'.

So by the time it hits the plate - as food or anything else - it carries high life-cycle costs and is expensive.

As Sterling writes,

In a globalized "flat world", the remaining peaks soar in value and become natural clusters for a planetary elite.

In other words, things that are authentic and have provenance become a luxury item.

So what?

Well there is a casualty.

And it's something really basic:

The thrill, excitement and subversion of imitation.

Cartoon courtesy of Gastonomica.

Unravelling the spaghetti

This is an image of the Spaghetti Junction interchange in the West Midlands, England.

In 1990, several architectural designers came up with some alternative design ideas for the area over and under the Junction: an infrastructural megastructure that's magnificent to see from above and travel through but that cuts up communities living either side.

Robert Adam, the classicist English architect, decided to accentuate the interchange as a gateway to the city:

American internationalists Swanke Hayden Connell  decided to condense the structure by building on top and around it with offices and housing: 

Annoyingly I don't have an image of the scheme by Melanie Sainsbury, a former partner in crime of Nigel Coates and the Narrative Architecture Today group.

But Melanie imagined a fabulous, Hamburg-style nightclub beneath the interchange piers:

And alongside recent RIBA Gold Medal winner Edward Cullinan, Finnish landscape architects Pirkko Higson chose to use the scale of spaces beneath the interchange

and imagine a jungle:

Five architects, five revisions of a public space: oh God! another architectural ideas initiative!

Yes. But there's a small but important dimension to this project.

Over at BLDGBLOG, there's speculation on the relationship between architecture and the media.

How are architectural ideas communicating through...various media? Does the medium itself inform the message, as it were – and in what specific way? How are architecture and architectural ideas repackaged for discussion in these various forms?

The project on Spaghetti Junction contributes to the discussion because it was commissioned by the British Broadcasting Corporation and was broadcast as a special edition of an innovative arts TV series called The Late Show.

The person who came up with the project idea - er, me! - wanted to speculate upon the different pictures of the world in architectural designers' heads, suppressed by tight top-buttons done up and the virulent anti-architectural spirit of the times, triggered by Prince Charles' outburst against the National Gallery extension by Venturi Scott-Brown. 

Nothing much has happened to the space since this outburst of creative visioning, perhaps confirming in the abstract architect Bernard Tschumi's thought that

No spatial organization ever changes the socio-economic structure of a reactionary society.

But one principal stands tall.

Architecture need not be communicated by the media simply through reportage.

It can be communicated by the media acknowledging that it has a role as a protagonist in the public realm and that it can make its presence known as commissioner and cultural speculator.

In some places or situations, civic organization is dead and buried.

In others, it is fractured in to bowling associations, amenity groups and people obsessed with the world on their doorstep.

In others still, local government has given up the job of curating the physical quality of public life.

The question is whether the media can and is willing to fill the void and become an activist promoter of civic value and support the common sense prescription of architect Denise Scott-Brown when she wrote:

Where civic design succeeds, it is usually because it is sponsored by a civic organisation that operates as watch-dog, implementer, funder, maintainer, and supporter of the project because this group has convinced the city that its project is in the interest of the whole community.

Yes, the media is entertainment. And yes, it's devoted to making money. It would be deadly if it were otherwise.

But if architecture is defined by the actions it witnesses as much as the enclosure of its walls, ditto the media.

Somewhere between the two there is common purpose.

So the job has got to be to get media corporations to not just commission superstarchitect head offices but become activists and sponsors of design and social innovation.

And for architects to not take such a snobbish, PR-orientated attitude towards the media, acknowledge a mutual role as shapers of the public realm, not hide in the basements of their buildings...and PLAY!

Pictures of Spaghetti Junction courtesy of Tim Ellis.

A useful first base

For all of those people out there sick and tired of looking at stuff and itching to get stuck in to making new realities comes a very simple statement from curator Nicolas Bourriaud, writing about the art of Philippe Parreno:

Interpreting the world does not suffice; it must be transformed.

Image courtesy of Bruce Sterling.

Dark and new Satanic Mills

Over the last ten years, according to the London Financial Times, loans for prospective small-scale landlords have risen from 2% to 10% of all mortgages.

Thousands of newly built flats have been constructed in English cities such as Leeds, Manchester and Nottingham to fuel and sate demand.

But over-valuation, fake discounts, skimming by lenders, increases in mortgage costs and a simple lack of demand is witnessing thousands of these flats remaining empty or let at rents that do not cover mortgages.

Newspaper reports highlight the plight of investors with portfolios valued in millions now turning to dust, personally owing millions and fearing repossession of their own front doors.

Time to re-cast a famous poem?

And did those feet in ancient time

walk upon England’s mountains green?

And was the holy Lamb of God

on England’s pleasant pastures seen?

And did the countenance divine

shine forth upon our clouded hills?

And was Jerusalem builded here

among these dark Satanic Mills?

Pictures courtesy of Aeschli, Martin Q and  Sternology.

Hello Kitty (with a little bit of hell)

The London Financial Times reports that China has overtaken France as a market for art sales.

According to a nameless art critic:

It is simply emblematic of the French decline. There hasn't been a brilliant French artist since the second world war.

China claims 15 of the 35 artists worldwide who command seven-digit sales, and the country's artists have seen prices rise eight-fold in the past seven years.

Last year I visited the art district of Tank Loft in Chongqing.

The area is decked out in ways that we can only dream:

At the center of the district is a network of artists' studios, located on the campus of the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute that's been designed with knowing understanding of military-industrial chic.

I've blogged elsewhere  about floors rendered smooth by the procession of Western art dealers and curators who have made pilgrimage here.

But what's great about the place is that alongside the professional artists is a network of studios of artists who are students at the Institute, like Liao Man:

Just check out her work.

Yes, it's saccharin and self-conscious.

And no, it doesn't command seven-digit receipts.

But there's a quiet, ironic exorcism and joke/celebration of consumerism going on here that loses nothing in translation.

Every image of her face bears a red mark that's a scar.

Art with baggage in tow

I love Takashi Murakami and his art.

The redeemed cosmopolitanism that curator and critic Dave Hickey highlighted in his Sante Fe Biennial back in 2001 was a fantastic catch-all for an artist who loves sheen, style, otaku and the baroque rendering of some kind of primordial iconography.

   

But there's something annoying about Murakami - and I can't quite work out whether it's him, the bad behavior of those who surround and promote him, a bit of both or a bigger message about art. :-S

There's a major retrospective of Murakami's work currently on show at the Brooklyn Museum.

At the gala opening last week, outside the museum, in pride of place, were street vendors

the kind typically seen on many New York/Hong Kong/Paris/whatever avenues, selling "Louis Vuitton" bags

writes Vanessa Friedman in the London Financial Times.

Guy Trebay in the New York Times gives an eyewitness account:

Standing outside them were men who resembled the African immigrant vendors who haul around telltale bundles of alluring, cheapish and almost-right copies of stuff from Gucci and Louis Vuitton. This time, however, these characters were playacting. The goods laid out on trays and tarps were real Vuitton accessories. They cost, as they do in the stores, a bomb.

The entire stunt - or piece of performance art, to use Friedman's words  - was designed to publicize counterfeiting.

In the words of the Chief Executive of Louis Vuitton:

It's an opportunity to send an artistic and political message, showing that street vendors can be good - they're part of the life of a city - but that counterfeit is bad - it destroys that life.

What is all of this? Art? Politics? Pure public relations?

Yes, to all of them.

But Murakami needs to watch out.

It's great that the street show defiles those who cherish the idea of art as the creation of a unique primary object and exhibitions as a pompous opportunity to celebrate and investigate all of this.

It also great that the blood boils when street culture is appropriated and selectively edited to make a pseudo political/promotional point on behalf of a luxury brand, and for an elitist band

who had almost certainly never bartered for an $80 copy of a $1,400 bag off a blanket on the sidewalk.

But Murakami is in danger of becoming a vehicle for moral judgement - and judgement over an economy that's a well-spring of his happy aesthetic.

For the black economy is an intrinsic part of the energy and joy of the city, its obsessives and obsessions. 

And it's somewhere in this culture that Murakami and his art finds its strength and expression.

Images of Brooklyn Museum street market courtesy of Athlete Movie.

A case of blurred vision

This is quite often how I see the world, especially in shopping malls.

Things just get blurred. And I don't take in the detail.

Until this week, I thought that I was crazy.

Then came a blinding light.

Social scientist Monica Degen and geographers Caitlin DeSilvey and Gillian Rose have studied people's experience of a shopping mall in Milton Keynes, England.  (God help them!)

In a recent paper, they wrote up their research and drew attention to what they call manoeuvring:

a broad surveying gaze which is used to move around objects, which acknowledges objects but does not engage in any depth with them.

In other words, focus-pulling on the move:

In this 'thin' or unfocused look, objects exist as part of a scene to be passed through, blurred together into indistinct background with little sense of form and detail. When one has a specific destination in mind, it is very easy to blank out the intervening content. A 'thicker', more engaged look appears when we approach the final destination of our walk and our eyes zoom in: a person we expect to meet, a specific shop, a desired object, a possible purchase perhaps - pull out from the stream of material stimuli.

All of this may be obvious to you.

But to me, it's near Biblical.

In effect, the potential qualities of a specific space are animated by how we engage with it.

This is another reason why places should be designed in ways that allow for accidental looks.

Why environmental phenomena like desire lines are so revealing:

And why, when you move through a landscape, it sometimes feels like you create your own space.

In other words, to steal a technique from long-distance swimming, you create your own water.

Image of Berling courtesy of dreasan.  Desire path by Fin Fahey.