David Barrie

A place is an experience, and not a brand

At a recent conference on The Art of Placemaking at NLA, London, the air was thick with talk of “branding” and “curating” real estate and "programming" opportunities in the built environment for people to socialise. (Standard device: hip canteen. Decor: super-sized graphics. Fuel: super-sized soya latte.)

The event was timely, since the making of successful places is a key objective of recent reforms to the planning system in the UK and key feature in an high-profile review in to the future of the High Street, or Main Street.

The National Planning Policy Framework emphasises establishing a strong sense of place to create thriving local economies.

And the Portas Review promotes the imagining of new social places that give a sense of belonging and trust to a community.

Now no-one, not even a caveman, could contest the value of public gathering spaces to human experience, but there are issues that stand in the way of delivering the inclusive, life-changing experience and collective meaning that the idea of place implies:

• most landowners prefer to screen out undesirables from the property that they own or manage
• convention is that public spaces are designed by professionals who then offer it to the public for adoption, and
• corporate profit tends to favour behaviours that are predictable and disciplined

Problem is it is the very unplanned-ness of a space and its unintended uses that often generates delightful, memorable and meaningful pleasure.

What's more, the principle of exclusion is at odds with popular culture in an age of internet economy, which maximises opportunities for people to share, like and make their own spaces, relationships and experiences.

How to create places in towns and cities that overcome these issues and develop a real estate that engenders the culture of the virtual?

Several strategies just now seek to address the question.

In the urban designer’s toolbox, there's the animation of public spaces by creating community facilities, green spaces, places to grow food, market days, nights and work hubs.

Progressive urban planners suggest more diverse use of the built environment, including the decommissioning of Main Street as a retail centre and its re-commissioning as a social one - a return to the idea of an Agora which inspired the ancient Greeks and urban professionals in the U.S.A. in the 1970s in their revitalisation of downtown districts.

While experts in retail markets look to the recasting of the real and virtual through experience shopping or click and collect, a place in which “Shops will become glorified showrooms”, according to Jeremy Newsum of the Grosvenor Estate in a recent article in Property Week (£).

One strategy that we are committed to in our work - and is featured in the new book The Temporary City, a collection of thought-provoking new creativity in placemaking from around the world - is to apply to the built environment some of the techniques that make online spaces 'sticky' for millions of consumers, and approach the creation of place as interaction design.

Another is to borrow from the playbook of documentary media producers, who create a framework for a story, populate it with content and then edit and re-edit intended and unintended content to arrive at an experience for the public to enjoy - and then, if they want to, codify as a brand or franchise.

Both approaches feel appropriate to an age of ubiquitous content, of increasing consumption of increasingly customized personal services via smartphones, and technology that changes constantly our relationship with everyday products and services in ever complex, interactive ways.

What's telling is that if you apply a more interactive, content-led approach to the built environment, you quickly arrive at some pretty traditional, lo-fi ways to turn a hum-drum space in to a place.

Here are three random inspirations and ideas.

Take a look at Chicago's Waste to Profit Network, a virtual facility which helps businesses identify by-products and waste from one business that can be used as inputs by another. It establishes a public space as a network hub for production and consumption that takes place in diverse geographies.

What if we created an equivalent experience by networking activities, cultures and tastes across the dispersed geography of a city?

What if we took the public spaces of a major world city and turned them in to the venue for a *giant* Silent Disco, with different spaces in different neighbourhoods acting as different 'rooms' or 'servers' for different sounds?

Kind of a whole-city version of the Mobile Clubbing craze that popped up several years ago - here in London's Tate Modern back in 2007.

Then take a look at fashion designer Marc Jacob’s Facebook page.

Last year, Jacobs, a passionate owner of two Bull Terriers, invited subscribers to his page to upload pictures of their dogs, some of whom accessorised their pups with his products.

Not a big deal, but makes me think: what if we created public places which invited people to bring something to the space and leave it there?

Not exactly a new idea, I know: think notes left on devotional statues in places of worship or in the cracks of the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem.

Then take a look at U.K. broadcaster Channel Four's award-winning TV series Hugh’s Fish Fight.

This was an old skool story of investigative, campaigning journalism that exploited diverse media platforms to cultivate - and more importantly be able to project itself - as a successful movement for change.

The popularity of this, and other media causes, begs an obvious, naive question: how about creating places with the express purpose of enabling human expression, Urban Commoning and Occupation, spaces that support collective socialising, rather than deter it?

To create place, we need to provide opportunities for people to exchange goods, services and emotion.

Some of this is to do with built infrastructure and deregulation. Some of it is to do with central programming of things that we can enjoy communally.

But if we are to look to public space to generate bigger social returns of belonging and trust, we need to maximize opportunities by which people can call public space, even privatised public space, their own.

This is in part about nurturing and nudging informal uses of public space - about making them 'sticky', not controlling them, about finding ways in which users can generate and manage their own pleasure.

All of this could be a free-for-all, a mess.

It could start to look like the faeces-out-of-the-window existence of eighteenth century England - and note the pastiche design of the current vintage window displays of London department store Harvey Nichols.

There's an equivalence in the disorderly personality of the multi-coloured townscape of a place like Guanajuato, Mexico or Willemstad in Curacao.

And architecturally, there's inspiration in John Kormerling's Happy Street in the Dutch Pavilion at Expo 2010 Shanghai.

This is an idea of place that's not defined by hygenic, brand-directed, open plazas but the richness, complexity and excitement of the present - the experience of NOW.

This is a dimension to the Art of Placemaking - and you know what, it's (kind of) artless.

Images courtesy of:  1. Immo Klink, Disturbing Factors (2007) via Northern Gallery of Contemporary Art  2. Candy Chang 3. American Airlines via Trendwatching  4. Yvan Rodic (Paris, December 2010)  5. Jan Chipchase  6. Dean Ayres  7. ce matin, un lapin  8. unknown  9. Style Crusader

Tahrir, cities and a new enterprise of public place

The Limits of Cyber-Revolutions was an outstanding article in a recent edition of New York Magazine on how Public spaces, not virtual town squares, are still the places where uprisings are decided.

While writer Eric Goldwyn acknowledged that a robust Twitter following and widely followed Facebook group may have changed the way that insurrections like the Arab Spring are built,

It takes physical space to connect revolutionary passions with daily life and, more important, the broader population.

When citizens unite in a square, a park, or along a scenic beachfront to demand reform, it creates an impossible-to-ignore spectacle that draws the attention of anyone nearby, not to mention those watching at home.

Of course, spectacle is critical to the role of public spaces in making social change and social value - be it Tahrir Square, street protests in Athens or (dare I say it in the same breath) the Royal Wedding. :*

But Eric's point is that physical public spaces in cities remain the place where people often choose to make life-changing decisions.

We make history on the streets, while the content of our lives and political, social and creative concerns are created elsewhere.

So what? Here's what.

Over the last decade, massive slugs of public and private investment have been made in creating key attractors in cities, like new museums, plazas, parks and gigantic Super Size Me works by artists like Anish Kapoor.

In the light of events in Tahrir Square, the impact of austerity measures in Europe and the possibility of a big slowdown in China, these investments are starting to look less like the 'catalysts to change' that they were marketed as.

And they look more like what they were always were: objects in pursuit of competitive economic advantage, the confidence of a global arts/Hyatt Plaza investment elite and expressions of order that offer solid comfort (in the face of the disorder of change).

But now that we're reminded of the power of the streets and values other than house price inflation, is it time to start to mainstream a different offer and use for public space in our cities?

How about seeing public space as less of a function of the tourist or global cultural economy and more as opportunity spaces of our own, places that tap up personal and local political, social, creative and intellectual feelings, rather than the kind of me-too, read-it-once content of an in-flight magazine?

Curate public places as amusement arcades, 'museums without walls', outdoor class rooms or a place for forests of tree houses from which to see the surrounding cityscape.

Create places where people can give stuff away - at its most esoteric, books left on a wall or clothing left on a seat for others to pick up.

Conceive of an infrastructure for our cities that mimics all the diversity, multiplicity and energy of the online landscapes we inhabit and encourage public spaces to be used by multiple groups, for different types of relationships and experiences?

Of course urban economies need to continue to chase and serve global corporate tenants and capital who (it's assumed) tend to prefer manicured, clean and high culture views from their windows.

But cities in advanced and emerging markets also need to devise ways and means by which they define themselves - and not let competitors define them.

If cities want to foster new intellectual, property, knowledge, product and service innovation, they need to reach for a new playbook and review and sweat their own assets.

They need to cultivate public places that allow us to reach for adjectives like "useful", not just "beautiful", "personal", not just "professional", and nouns like "playground" and "enterprise", rather than expressions like "it looks nice but please get out of the way, I'm late for my meeting". :)

If savvy public or private investors aren't able to create spaces that offer more than neutral, minimalist 'platforms' for conventional entertainment, it's up to creative and social entrepreneurs to support new vitality in adjacent neighborhoods or districts - a vitality that's so attractive, sensitive, human and socially conscious that it spreads like a contagion through the city.

Some of this is already going on in cities like London, New York, Moscow and Barcelona, spilling from the back-packs of a global creative elite.

But how are we going to turn this urban entrepreneurship in to a strand of popular culture - especially in towns, cities and countries where people don't believe that they have an investment in the public realm?

There may be a clue buried in the closing sentence of an article by Raul Juste Lores of Folha de São Paulo in a recent edition of Monocle:

Innovation is mandatory if you don't want to be just a commodities exporter.

Images courtesy of 1. Rosemary Sabet 2. WBUR 3, 5 & 6. Yvan Rodic 4. jmenard48 7. Jan Chipchase 8. Deep in Vogue

Facilitating altruism

 

A priority for all organizations just now is to help people to help others - and backfill holes in the provision of public and private services, not simply earn a Fast-track ticket to Heaven.

Around the world, governments are encouraging people to give their time and skill, not just cash to others - in the UK, the recent Giving Green Paper presented four devices for doing this: the National Citizen Service, Community First, Community Organizers and Volunteering Infrastructure Programme.

And technology is helping to extend the repertoire of giving from donations of cash to the collection and distribution of a broader basket of currencies - be it services like Twitter that give people the opportunity to share knowledge, Kickstarter that links philanthropists to projects and causes, or Ecomodo, a website that enables people to swap and share objects and skills.

What's emerging is a more distributed Gift Economy, one that is reliant less upon the billion pound drop of a Mark Zuckerberg or Warren Buffett and more on the creation of a local social network and market.

We are helping clients design and deliver several projects just now that seek to facilitate this kind of altruism, or microphilanthropy.

The projects are often business solutions to a social problem. Their personality and proftability is linked to the 'collective-creative drive' of cities and their communities. And often, they seek to trigger an up-tick in the development and performance of the local economy.

Here are some of the principles we are working to just now, mindful of a time of rationed debt and the need for advanced economies to push at developing community capitalism:

1.    Give donors something back

Members of The People's Supermarket - a new social venture in London founded by entrepreneurs Arthur Potts-Dawson, Kate Wickes-Bull and David Barrie (that's me!) - earn savings at the checkout and a right to direct the venture in return for their donation of a membership fee (£25/€28/$40) and four hours labor each month.

2.    Give donors choices

Participants in the Shiregreen Neighbourhood Challenge - a new initiative supported by NESTA and designed by us with Sanctuary Group to support the development of a large housing estate in Shiregreen, City of Sheffield - will be able to earn reward points for participating in civic life and convert them in to goods or services, via a new 'community bank'. Depending on how generous they feel, people will be able to choose to donate their reward to a local cause.

3.    Give donors opportunities to yield value from dormant assets that they hold

Currently, we are advising somewhereto_, one of four national programmes of the Cultural Olympiad and a legacy initiative of the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games that seeks to help young people find the spaces thay need to do the things that they love.

In effect, somewhereto_ is a service that seeks to encourage owner/managers of empty offices, industrial workshops, parks, gardens, community centres and other kinds of real estate to donate their assets for occupancy on an interim basis to young people with enterprise and ambition.

Benefits to the donor include eligibility for tax breaks and an increase in the rentable/rateable value of their asset.

4.     Give donors opportunities to see their 'gifts' as part of a longer-term investment strategy

For two years, we have been supporting the start-up of a new media enterprise in Cardiff, Wales called Digital Butetown - part of a larger role creating and managing a programme of community involvement and investment on behalf of real estate investors igloo Regeneration.

Digital Butetown is a new social business led by local arts organization Community Helps Itself which will train local people in digital media production and computer programming.

For igloo, to support the start-up of Digital Butetown is in part to invest in local media culture and the supply of services to prospective tenants of Porth Teigr, a new creative industries neighbourhood that igloo is developing in joint venture with the Welsh Assembly Government.

Some of the lessons that we're learning from assisting the progress of microphilanthropy:

In an age of disposable time not money, we need to invent ways in which people can not just help others but also win a hard return on their investment.

It makes sense to recruit momentum at the grassroots, since it's hard to see how the generosity of the new immigrant rich from Russia, India and the Arab world - as (bizarrely) described in a recent article in the Guardian newspaper - will reach down in to neighborhoods.

And helping people to help each other is less about relying upon Good Samaritans and more about creating virtuous circles of supply and demand.

It suggests that corporations and states who want to trigger altruism need to foster progressive local economies - not just enlist armies of people to rattle tins - and this will require new ways and means to capture public attention: a new 'storyworld' for a new Gift Economy.

Images courtesy of 1. Tartolom 2.hiserhott 3. Haarala Hamilton Photography 4. Sanctuary Group 5. Livity 6. Author 7. Unknown.

 

Arts, culture and development: creating "more for less"

For over a decade, the creative industries, especially the visual and performing arts, have been seen as important drivers of competitive advantage in the U.K., especially for 'post-industrial' cities, communities and real estate.

But in an age of fiscal tightening, social enterprise, green enterprise and infrastructure are fast becoming "the new black", with their promise of new employment, new markets and a new alignment of development, sustainability and social justice.

The challenge for the arts/creative sectors is stark. To make matters worse, culture may thrive everywhere but bankers' bonuses don't - and these are a key source of philanthropy and investment.

Earlier this month I led a one-day 'masterclass' on culture and urban renewal, supported by Arts Council England, Sheffield City Council and New Start that asked the question: In a time of 'more for less', can cultural enterprise offer value for money and different models?'

My answer is "yes" - but with two first thoughts.

First, cultural people need to assume the mantle of a warrior class, go to the gun cabinet and engage immediately with particular symptoms of downturn: empty properties, low rental demand and struggling businesses.

So, point one, take up your weapons, get down and get dirty.

 

Point two, promote public association and use this to make markets for new enterprise - and for inspiration, take a look at the current DIY Urbanism exhibit at the Urban Center in San Francisco.

In a fit of pre-'masterclass' nerves, I wrote down two lists of things that I find inspiring in the fuzzy thing we call 'culture': one list of 'creative places', the second of 'creative culture'.

And instead of arias, artworks or award-winning, architect-designed spaces, I was prioritising places that stage and express imagination, excitement or communal experience.

Now a lot of what I've listed doesn't address key issues of recession such as food, shelter, transportation and security - or at least directly.

But they do suggest that in a time of 'more for less' we should

• highlight business and entertainment solutions to social problems
• continue to shift creativity away from edification to the nurturing of talent and self-help
• make social spaces in which that talent can collectivize and excel
• take a leaf out of Facebook and launch hundreds of new applications every day

And a given is the principle scratched on the beam of a studio in East London, photographed by Viktor Vauthier: 

So here are my lists:

 For Creative Places...

Hub, Angel, Islington, London

Hepworth Gallery, Wakefield

Kitchen at the St. John restaurant, London

Latitude Festival, Suffolk

Union Street Orchard, London

People dancing beside a lake in North Beijing, China (seen a few years ago)

Wardrobe making studio, Scottish Opera, Glasgow

Chictopia - a website for user-generated fashion content

The offices/flat of culture website http://www.lookatme.ru, Moscow

Gardens of Musee Branly, Paris

Backstage, New York Fashion Week (seen a few years ago)

Upstairs room - turned in to a bar - of Malcolm, a former coal-worker, Castleford, Yorkshire

Chalk drawings for a vintage clothing store, pavement, Shoreditch, London

Studio of Georg Baselitz, Germany (seen a few years ago)

 

For Creative Culture...

Work of Manchester dupstep/2-step producer Synkro

Streetstyle photography of Yvan Rodic

Fashion blogger Wedge Heel

Cycling cafe 'Look Mummy No Hands'

Park Slope food co-operative, Brooklyn

Grameen Bank and other micro-finance organizations

Florence and the Machine's live performances

Green Demolition company Buffalo Re-Use

Social innovation project Southwark Circle

Under Age Festival, Hackney

Work of fashion designers Rodarte & Stolen Girlfriend

X-Factor
 

Feel free to hate what's here - but please do your own list.

In the meantime, I'll

Images courtesy of: 1. Pasquale Ottaiano. 2. The New Black. 3. Jake and Dinos Chapman. 4. Viktor Vauthier. 5. Banksy via Tony Hisgett.

 

 

 

 

 

Food Glorious Food

In the push to overcome shrinking investment in social services, energise towns and cities and develop more self-funded local activities, there's real value in encouraging innovation around food - and beyond the 'barnyard realism' of urban agriculture or farmers' markets.

As an article in environmental blog Grist recently said, smart cities are (un)paving the way for urban farmers and for sure, it's great to promote and exploit the value of using redundant land to 'grow your own' - and something that we've done a lot, for example in an urban farming initiative that was featured recently in a report on design, sustainability and innovation by a U.K. Government department and exhibited in Toronto, moving to New York soon.

Innovative food retail and production is vital to the creative economy of cities, the sustainability of their resource management and the freedom of choice offered by places that real estate developers and local government create for residents and visitors alike.

Here's three things that I've spotted recently.

The Big Gay Ice Cream Truck, a vehicle for exotic toppings like wasabi-pea powder, olice oil and cardomon, according to an article in New York magazine, one of *twenty-five* food trucks featured that are the next step up the evolutionary ladder from the traditional sidewalk food cart.

The Smile Restaurant and General Store, New York whose clientele are described in a review in New York magazine as an abundance of vaguely hippieish people milling about in lumberjack shirts, hand-stitched moccasins, skinny jeans, lush whiskers, and tattoos. ! :)

And Ontario-based dairy and cheese producer Fifth Town Artisan Cheese Co whose founder Petra Cooper was the subject of a recent profile in Fortune magazine that majored on her change of career from president of a unit of publisher McGraw Hill Ryerson Canada, after learning that an island on Lake Ontario had 19 wineries but no artisanal diaries.

Now I am no foodie AT ALL and as fast as you can say "KFC bucket", I'll race for a non-artisan plate of this:

But these food micro-enterprises are vital to high-quality infrastructure at a community scale and underscore innovative food retail and production as generators of employment.

They express freedom of choice, provided you have the money, and allied to the collective action or 'new urban commons' of many food growing schemes form part of the 'creative food economy' and public infrastructure that makes for a healthy city.

Images courtesy of 1. Yvan Rodic. 2. bitchcakesny. 3. The Smile. 4. Finn O'Hara Photography. 5. I've got a Lust for Life.

Cultivating a fashion for change

 

If you want to design ways for people to associate, innovate development or spread an idea, read a fashion blog. 

Fashion blogging is a fantastic online space, drunk on creativity, enthusiasm, networking - and yes, pushiness, careerism and an orgy of affiliate marketing and product placement too. 

But follow fashion blogs and you'll soon discover a treasure-trove of ways and means that like-minded souls express their interest, exchange and share enthusiasms and enlist slaves to their cause. 

As I've posted before, fashion online is a space full of amateurs turned pro/semi-pro who've assumed a status that gets them flown worldwide for fashion events and reserved seats on the front row of Fashion Week. 

One clue to the influence of fashion bloggers is how they associate with one another and are organized online.

Fans contribute in their thousands to user-generated content sites, like Chictopia and Lookbook.

They share knowledge and affiliations via community networks like Independent Fashion Bloggers.

Friends collaborate to bulk up content and reach - see Anywho.

And while websites like Freshnet foster and aggregate blogs to sell advertising, Bubbleroom hosts them to direct audiences to their online shop.

What you end up with is enthusiasts starring in their own shoots:

Brands and patterns spreading like wildlife, like Balmain - see MCM and Chicmuse - and most recently - see Studded Hearts and Belle de Couture - Miu Miu's swallow print:

Alongside fans winning careers, thousands of square miles of new online real estate - 'personalized surfaces' - are created for advertising.

It may offend sensitive minds - and now may be a difficult time to talk of things that invite excess - but this all now (weirdly) seems (to me at least) very relevant to the cause of increasing citizen participation, fostering local activism and seeding grassroots economies - an obsession just now in the U.K.

The scale and dynamism of fashion blogging shows what happens when people have the freedom and space to develop their passion.

The diverse ways in which bloggers organize and associate shows how individuality can be networked and collectivized effectively, so long as raw enthusiasm remains up front.

What's more, these blogs show that enthusiasts can grow in to communities, so long as there's a degree of permission to participate - in this case, granted by owners of intellectual property - and options available to make money, should people want it.

Some fashion bloggers earn money by associating with large and small company partners, others through advertising.

Flip this for a conclusion:

marketing people are starting to see some amateur enthusiasts and what they're up to as an effective route to market and valuable source of profit.

As ever, forget fashion at your peril. :)

Images courtesy of 1.Yvan Rodic. 2. Jak & Jil Blog. 3. Yvan Rodic. 4.Late Afternoon. 5. chicmuse. 6. fashiontoast.

Overweight on urbanism

In a recent talk at the London School of Economics, sociologist Saskia Sassen cited a brilliant statement attributed to psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan:

Idealism is the lover you haven't met yet. 

Landscape architect Jason A. King of Landscape + Urbanism has populated one corner of the loveless - a field whose poster boy is actor Robert De Niro in the 1970s film Hi, Mom!

.

Bored at a conference in Portland, Jason fixed on the tsunami of things just now that are paired with the word 'urbanism'.

He went home, did a quick Google search and came up with an hilarious - and terrifying - pick-n-mix dictionary of ways in which people choose to interpret life in cities and movements within it. 

New Urbanism
Ecological Urbanism
Future Urbanism
Green Urbanism
Resilient Urbanism
Infrastructural Urbanism
Sustainable Urbanism
Emergent Urbanism
Participatory Urbanism
Walkable Urbanism
Everyday Urbanism
Real Urbanism
Clean Urbanism
Border Urbanism
Exotic Urbanism
2nd Rate Urbanism
Beautiful Urbanism
Brutal Urbanism
Denied Urbanism
Political Urbanism
Middle Class Urbanism
Paid Urbanism
Post-Traumatic Urbanism
Big Urbanism
Agricultural Urbanism
Open Source Urbanism
Opportunistic Urbanism
Instant Urbanism
Unitary Urbanism
Bricole Urbanism
Slum Urbanism
Networked Urbanism
Bypass Urbanism
Gypsy Urbanism
DIY Urbanism
Integral Urbanism
Inverted Urbanism
Vernacular Urbanism
Pop-Up Urbanism
Nuclear Urbanism
New (Sub)Urbanism
Informal Urbanism
Behavioral Urbanism
Temporary Urbanism
Braided Urbanism
Trace Urbanism
Market Urbanism
Propagative Urbanism
Radical Urbanism
Anti-Urbanism
Disconnected Urbanism
Magical Urbanism
Recombinant Urbanism
Guerilla Urbanism
Dialectical Urbanism
Stereoscopic Urbanism
Holy Urbanism
Retrofuture Urbanism
Digital Urbanism
Micro Urbanism
Parametric Urbanism

Help!

:-o

Jason's post here. 

First and last images courtesy of Yvan Rodic.

Punk Regeneration

This is artist Laura Oldfield Ford's sardonic dig at the gentrification - or yuppification - of urban life, using a combination of pseudy Socialist Realism and Special Offer stamps. It's hilarious. 

Oldfield Ford is an East London Warrior Princess who expresses Class War by depicting - according to the Tate Britain website (sic) - dystopian scenes, class conflict and urban ruins using ballpoint pen, fluorescent spray paint and acrylic.

 

As the Tate website says, Ford makes work that both imagines a future London whilst simultaneously sifting through the detritus of history.

 

Ford's work is in part motivated by what she sees as an absence of herself and other people's selves in the development and regeneration plans of cities - “I’ve looked into the future and I can’t find myself ANYWHERE.”

And she reserves special blame for the real estate sector - in the following work, St Modwen Properties, a company involved in bringing forward some key development sites in the UK:

Now all of this dystopian stuff is sexy in its counter-cultural-biro-ness. It chimes well with a view of the U.K. as Broken Britain, sits pretty in an age of post-apocalyptic nihilism - for another view, see Russian artist Vladimir Manyuhin's visions of a decayed world - and is a miserabilist drone that syncs well with the retro bits of people's iTunes playlists - in my case, the greatest, angriest hits of Crass and Part Chimp.

But hold on! WAKE UP!

In an age of huge public sector deficits, private sector investors are not the villains but the cavalry. 

We need to Make Poverty History, not update and adapt Europe After the Rain by Max Ernst - one of the greatest works of twentieth century art.

What's more, there have been tremendous advances in recent years - for instance in new media technology and online urban advocacy - that enable people to start to call a city or place their own, rather than simply become the thirteenth tribe of urban renewal, The Deleted. 

These advances fly past Ford's view of urban life: a comic/zine aesthetic that's ticklish, needs to be noticed since it's the tip of an exciting neo-punk thing but in the end is only for folks with fetishes for images of war-damaged Chechnya or those nice yellow Bic biro ballpoint pens that used to snap and leak in your pocket. 

More on Oldfield Ford's work:  

• Podcast of the artist talking about her view of the city and the apocalyptic painting of John Martin - a Tate Conversation Piece - can be downloaded from iTunes (December 2009)
• More images of the artist's work available at sjrobertson at flickr.com (March 2009)
• Article on Oldfield Ford's work in Frieze magazine (February 2009)
  
• The artist has a website and publishes a zine called Savage Messiah. (But both websites down at time of writing.)

Images randomly pulled from the net. Apologies to the artist for theft.

Rodarte love

In January, Kate and Laura Mulleavy of fashion design company Rodarte scored a profile in the New Yorker by Amanda Fortini, a feat that took designer Karl Lagerfeld more decades of work to achieve than the sisters from Pasadena have lived, says the Wall Street Journal.

 

Rodarte is great because, as Fortini writes, it is where the beautiful meets the baroque:

Rodarte is great because the garments include a multitude of textiles and finicky ones, like tulle, organza, leather and lace), adornments (crystals, feathers, rosettes) and techniques (draping, pleating, dyeing).

Rodarte is great because the designers had no formal fashion training, learned basic sewing techniques from their mother and their creative vision is cinematic, inspired by horror movies and the work of Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu.

A recent feature on the Mulleavy sisters in RVCA ANP Quarterly sourced inspirations as diverse as the Space Shuttle, Frankenstein, Star Wars, burning Klu Klux Clan crucifixes, Stonehenge and seminal works of European art like Rachel Whiteread's House and Joseph Beuys' I Like America and America Likes Me.

In case your avant-garde funny-bone hasn't been tickled enough by now, the New Yorker reports a scene in the Rodarte studio of the designers setting fire to a piece of polyster fabric and collections in which all the clothing had been burned, stained, shredded, sandpapered or in some way "ruined".

And the article snoops a bulletin board in the designers' studio carrying images of paintings by Robert Rauschenberg, California condors, testing of the atomic bomb in the Nevada Desert and Degas' ballerina sculpture - a wistfulness in the foreground of much of the imaging of their work...

...and explicit in their latest collection:

Until March 14, Rodarte have an installation at the The Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum in New York - and if you are in the area, visit it.

But there's a moral in my tale (and it comes with a hat-tip to a comment made to me by Robert Hewison, a cultural historian and keen follower of the English art critic and social thinker John Ruskin). 

There's a reawakening of romantic anti-capitalism in culture and politics just now. In the U.K., you can see it in protest by the establishment against a third runway at Heathrow Airport, government endorsement of co-operativism, a policy rush on 'mass localism' and civic organizations like the National Trust turning sections of its property over to food-growing.

Rodarte is romantic, born from the obsession of two sisters brought up among the redwood trees of a small town near Santa Cruz, California, to quote Fortini. They burn stuff, love the spikey and fierce and are committed to beauty - albeit one that retails up to $25,000 a piece.

The two trends are worlds apart. But together they say something.

Romance and anti-materialism is an aesthetic. It has tradition. It is optimistic, often creatively destructive - a brilliant antidote to an age of disappointment or light at the end of a post-apocalyptic tunnel. 

But it can be expensive. No small part of the romance rests in the eccentric and the kinky. And if you work too hard to co-opt those values in to something consensual, you may kill the very spirit that you admire.  

Images: 1.Jillian0229 2. Interview Magazine 3.SavoirFlair 4.Fashionologie 5. NYC Art Style 6. Not known 7. Style.com via TeenAngster 8. Stardust and Sequins 9. Inside-out 

More Rodarte links here. And thanks to Dawn Danby. 

Shine on you Crazy Diamond

...is a pretty good track title for 2009, a year full of this kind of terror:

But hey, as ever, there's a French philosopher to hand, with three parts depression, six parts hope (and a cupboard full of Commes des Garçons, if my encounter with BHL several years ago is anything to go by). 

Here's Alain Badiou with a big thought on small victories, slavery and making change - via Roman gladiator Spartacus - from a recent review of Inifinitely Demanding by English philosopher Simon Critchley:

I think that we can have negative feelings, negative experience concerning injustice, the horrors of the world, terrible wars and so on. But all great movements in the political and historical field have been created, have been provoked not by that sort of negative feeling but always by a local victory. If we appreciate, for example, why we have during two years the great revolt of the slaves in the Roman Empire, under the leadership of Spartacus, it is not because slaves have the feeling of injustice...Because they always have that, it is their experience day after day. It is rather because in one small place, a small group of slaves finds new means, finally to create a victory. A small victory, a local victory. 

Images courtesy of Yvan Rodic and Showoff-Films.com.