Excerpt from Subculture: the meaning of style / Dick Hebdige (1979, p. 103)
…the concept of bricolage can be used to explain how subcultural styles are constructed. In the Savage Mind Levi-Strauss shows how the magical modes utilized by primitive peoples (superstition, sorcery, myth) can be seen as implicitly coherent, though explicitly bewildering, systems of connection between things which perfectly equip their users to ‘think’ their own world. These magical systems of connection have a common feature: they are capable of infinite extension because basic elements can be used in a variety of improvised combinations to generate new meanings within them. Bricolage has thus been described as a ‘science of the concrete’ in a recent definition which clarifies the original anthropological meaning of the term:
[Bricolage] refers to the means by which the non-literate, non-technical mind of so-called ‘primitive’ man responds to the world around him. The process involves a ‘science of the concrete’ (as opposed to our ‘civilised’ science of the ‘abstract’) which far from lacking logic, in fact carefully and precisely orders, classifies and arranges into structures the minutiae of the physical world in all their profusion by means of a ‘logic’ which is not our own. The structures, ‘impoverished’ or made up (these are rough translations of the process of bricoler) as ad hoc responses to an environment, then serve to establish homologies and analogies between the ordering of nature and that of society, and so satisfactorily ‘explain’ the world and make it able to be lived in. (Hawkes, 1977)
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Detox
- installations loop footage to divulge and liberate the charms of liminal processes, objects and subjects
- …circumspectly unravels the relationship between the camera, its subject and its maker through various techniques of disclosure
- subtle graduations of influence we might steal over our environment
- sculptural presentation and the power relationship between object and viewer
- wishful longing for an impossibly romantic reality
- understand our subjective positions in the world
- nihilistically adopting and discarding personas
- apocalyptic vision
- new form of narrative
- outlines its plans to appropriate high culture
- control methodologies
- control desires and control solutions and their own absurdities
- offer us a space for reflection
- take up directly what might be called the beauty issue
- micro-symmetry within the motifs and a macro-dissymmetry in the composition
- elevation of artifice
- paintings are rather screens
- remnants of another image of a natural world
- distance between signs and their signifiers
- pointers to particular epistemic systems, to sciences for example, which have drifted too far to be accessible any longer
Hotlinking: an exhibition of images from the Tate with immunity from seizure
Hotlinking is a mini-exhibition put together from highlights of Van Doesburg and the International Avant-Garde: Constructing a New World, showing at the Tate Modern from 04 Feb 2010 until 16 May 2010. The works have been generously loaned by overseas collectors and international museums and are presented here via the Immunity from Seizure page of the Freedom of Information section of the Tate website. This show, in its current form, will last for as long as the images remain there – when either the page is updated with new content, or sooner if the Tate decides to restrict hotlink access to their images. After which time each work, as access is denied, will be replaced by a browser generated broken image icon and continue indefinitely. I think I speak for Van Doesburg when I say that this icon retains the spirit of Elementarism; the dynamism of its diagonal lines reaffirming that he was in the right in his argument with Mondrian over them, and a worthy addition to the show and his legacy.
The physicality of beige
This is the way it used to work: computers were housed in a rough, beige plastic casing. They got grubby. They were boxy, they were clunky, they were heavy. Clusters of dead skin would coagulate on the corners of the CPU, large grey/brown smears would radiate from the CD eject button and the letters of each key on the keyboard would be circled by a ring of finger dirt. As the hardware grew older, the retardants in the plastic grew darker and yellower. Years of use were recorded on them as well as in them. My life was being involuntarily being recorded on to it. Every so often, I would inspect the underside of my mouse and scrape several full fingernail’s worth of gunk away from the area around the roller ball. It was like it was slowly becoming a cyborg – part human, part machine; a synthesis of organic and synthetic parts. It was immensely satisfying. There were traces of me everywhere, my life on my computer was physical.
This is the way it works now: computers are housed in shiny black plastic or brushed metal casings with incredibly smooth surfaces. They are sleek and light-weight. They don’t get grubby. They reflect my image back rather than collect fragments from it. My reflected image can become distorted in the high gloss by a build up of greasy finger marks, but these can be wiped off with the end of a sleeve and they constantly are. And doing so is immensely satisfying. It’s smoothness is designed to repel. It’s shape has become ornament. My life now is voluntarily recorded within it and through it. My preoccupations and procrastinations are chronicled across the web, every trace of me exists deep within my hard drive or remotely in the cloud.
Pancakes for the saint of Broadway
The halo represents an aura or glow of sanctity. The most iconic halo – plain, round and in outline only has over the of the history of art been drawn encircling the heads of the Virgin Mary, Old Testament prophets, the Four Evangelists as well as numerous saints and angels to distinguish them as the main identifiable figures within a painting. In the earliest Christian art, the halo was the reserve of the Christ figure, but during the Byzantine era, they were also afforded to emperors and empresses. The stipulation however was that the halo be in outline only. The solid halo, often in gold and with a cross extending beyond it, by way of hierarchy, was to be reserved only for persons of the Holy Trinity, especially Jesus.
The Catholic interpretation is that the halo represents the light of divine grace suffusing the soul, which is perfectly united and in harmony with the physical body. However it was also widely believed in popular piety that rather than a device of metaphorical representation, saints had visible haloes around their heads. This stemmed from the belief that haloes, like the aura of some Eastern religions, are visible to those with perception.
During the renaissance, as the development of highly realistic linear perspective opened up the 3rd dimension and allowed for greater compositional flexibility in art, painting came to be regarded as a window into space and the depiction of haloes became increasingly problematic for artists. The flatness of previous religious iconography determined that the halo be depicted as an aura surrounding the head; now with perspective, they were re-imagined as rings or flat golden disks floating above the heads of saints.
Looking for a tool to assist the navigation of the pseudo-spaces of Street View, Google developed a lightly shaded cursor geometry known affectionately as the “pancake”. The pancake is rectangular when moving across the façades of buildings and oval when following a road. Both shapes contort to fit the perspective of the scene giving an extra sense of depth as the mouse is moved around. This, like the painting of the renaissance, serves to emphasise the window into space metaphor of the embed that holds the panorama.
Double clicking the pancake takes you directly to the best panorama in that particular direction. Sometimes a little magnifying glass will appear in the bottom right corner, this is to indicate that double clicking will zoom in on the current image rather than transport you to another location. This happens when Google determine that the current view is the best for the selected location.
The pancake floats independently and democratically above the heads of everyone and everything. It is both a navigational tool and a metaphorical representation disappearing after 3 seconds of mouse inactivity. It rewards those that it hovers above with a glow of sanctity for about as long as it takes to read this sentence.