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So the other week the three kingpins of celebrity economics in Ireland, David McWilliams, Eddie Hobbs and George Lee were all on Saturday night TV.
However there were no handbags at dawn or any direct challenges at all to each others economic predictions/ political positions (pre June 24 this was before the official announcement of The Recession). Instead, the three men regressed into an economic nostalgia glued together with anecdotes of Curly Wurlys and half crowns found on the street and cashed in at the sweet shop.
A comment from The Property Pin:
I was hoping we would ‘get real’ but no. This is just a fluff piece with a little bit of light sabre rattling, but no killer thrusts. The three boys almost being publicly embarrassed for being so right, and having to defend themselves - ‘no miriam, i’m not a doom monger’.
I believe we’re going to need a televised blood and guts, bone crunching, broken teeth D-Day type watershed to burst this bubble.
“Why is my 100% mortgaged shoebox worth 40% less than what I paid for it, if I could even find someone to buy it? I don’t remember anyone pointing out that was a possibility when I was being brow beaten into buying it.”
With the Dans and the Austins and the Toms and the Kens in the dock to explain how this all came about.
People in Ireland aren’t long about whinging to Joe Duffy if they think they were charged too much for a meal in a restaurant, but we have an entire generation who have been ripped off for their life savings and possibly their career earnings and there isn’t a fucking murmur of discontent to be found anywhere. It’s disturbing.
It seems that the penny sweet remains the primary unit that acts both as a touchstone for avarice and a way to extrapolate larger economic structures.
There was an excellent article in the Sunday Tribune (business section) last weekend, written by Maxim Kelly, that drew attention to the recent trend of using nostalgia for advertising purposes.
There are other examples too, loads of them, some of which I’ve written about here
- The new TV ad for Sprite is a pastiche of Shaft, with Sprite bottles substituted for guns.
- The new McDonald’s TV ads cut to a flashback of ‘the eighties’ (I’ve so far seen two versions; one is of an aerobics class, bizarrely referencing fitness)
- Henri Hippo has been relaunched as the icon of Ulster Bank, albeit with a more digitised style of animation than before. I recently saw copy on a Henri billboard that read ‘Remember when happiness was staying up to watch Dallas?’
So there a few notable things here.
Mc Donalds and Sprite are both global corporations, and the signifiers they light on are similarly ‘global’ (ie referring to hegemonic American popular culture). Visually, these two ads also share a very distinct gritty, ‘analogue’ quality when they’re visually quoting The Past.
Henri Hippo is a much more localised phenomenon, with a much smaller audience, and the focus on Dallas as a childhood experience narrows the demographic further – to people around my age (twenties to early thirties) who lived in Ireland at the time. It’s an unusual experience to feel so targeted by advertising, and if nothing else it really makes me interrogate my memory and experience of this time. Do I really remember it like that? Is the story I have belonging to my childhood, or someone else’s?
Ulster Bank has today brought back the iconic 1980s children’s character Henri Hippo who introduced the idea of saving to a generation of Irish children nearly 30 years ago… At the re-launch of Henri Hippo, Richard Donnan, Managing Director of Ulster Bank Retail Markets said: “Henri Hippo will be fondly remembered by a generation of Irish adults who were introduced to the concept and habit of saving through a great sense of fun. Many of them will now have their own children to whom they will want to pass on a habit that will have served them well down through the years. We want to help parents encourage and motivate their children to save.”
From here
There is something larger here about nostalgia marketing and the time cycles that seem to be involved. I don’t know how ‘new’ the use of nostalgia is in marketing, but it seems to be running on a 20 – 30 year cycle at the moment.
In 1998, Nicolas Bourriaud actually wrote about this in relation to contemporary art, pointing out how art in the 80s drew from the ‘visual effectiveness’ of 60s Pop, and art in the nineties seemed to ‘identify’ with trends from the 70s, including a sense of crisis, saying
Fashion can thus create aesthetic microclimates which affect the way we read recent history.
My recent work has involved making objects that use ‘technologies of their time’ in order to reflect on questions of memory, nostalgia and the gaps in collective histories. This has sometimes involved recording a sound or image digitally and ‘translating’ it into an analogue technology. (I know I’m treading all kinds of fine lines here).
Typically this gives the recorded image or sound a much more ‘thing’-like’ quality: unreliable memories, expressions and conversations suddenly become more solid and weighty. Vinyl acetates, 35mm slide film, magnetic VHS tape - all these technolgies are thrown into a kind of sculptural relief when imagined alongside the floating ephemera of mp3s, tiffs and jpegs. Read the rest of this entry »
Civilian Art Projects & Curator’s Office, Washington DC, team up to present ‘Craigslist’. Featuring the work of Jason Horowitz, Jason Zimmerman, John & Joseph Dumbacher. From the press release:
craigslist explores how four artists utilize this renowned community website as a conceptual component in their artistic practice. The exhibition features works by the artist team Joseph Dumbacher & John Dumbacher, Jason Horowitz, and Jason Zimmerman and is co-curated by Jayme McLellan, Director of Civilian Art Projects, and Andrea Pollan, Director of Curator’s Office. An opening reception is scheduled for Friday, March 21 from 7 - 9 pm.
An essay by Andrea Pollan will accompany the exhibition. The artist team of Joseph and John Dumbacher solicit willing models on craigslist to meet them in movie theaters where they create haunting and identity-obscuring photographic portraits. Similarly, Jason Horowitz advertises for models to pose in his studio where he shoots extreme close-ups of their body parts and then explodes the scale of the image to create an unsettling nexus of anonymous portraiture and landscape. Jason Zimmerman exploits images posted by users on craigslist.org as his raw material. He creates digital photo albums of hundreds of individuals who publicize their sexual availability by uploading images of their naked bodies but with their facial identities distorted or obscured.
Civilian Art Projects, Curator’s Office, Craigslist
Image: Jason Horowitz, Liz #4, archival digital print, 42″ x63″, ed. 1/5, 2006
The Ballroom of Romance:
a place (Glenfarne, Co. Leitrim, Ireland; see the above picture)
a piece of literature (short story by William Trevor)
a film (directed by Pat O’Connor).
The three ballrooms came into being in that order; the literature was inspired by the facade of the building as Trevor drove past one day on his way to Enniskillen, and the film was a rendition of the short story. Amazing that a structure known as the ‘Nissan Hut’ could inspire such diverse cultural productions.
More about The Ballroom of Romance here
The photograph above is by Gareth Kennedy, taken one day while passing on the bus to Enniskillen.
Yesterday my laptop died.
I am ashamed to say that I reacted to this news in a similar fashion to how I responded to a recent phonecall notification of a family death: shock (surprising myself at how well I was dealing with ‘the situation’), followed by immersion in attempts at practical problem-solving, followed by belated panic and an overdue sense of hopelessness and disorientation.
Michael said something cool today. He said something remarkable and unprecedented has occurred to us as a species now – “We’ve reached a critical mass point where the amount of memory we have externalised in books and databases (to name but a few sources) now exceeds the amount of memory contained within our collective biological bodies. In other words, there’s more memory ‘out there’ than exists in ‘all of us’. We’ve peripheralised our essence.” *
I was haunted by the loss (of photos, music, work projects, documentation of artwork, pieces of writing, invoices, tax returns) that were embedded in this machine, not backed up. My outsourced memory was not backed up and I had no one to blame but myself. The worst part of the loss were the gaps in my inventory of the things I knew I had lost: the things I couldn’t even remember but had lost anyway. I imagined these things sitting zipped up tightly in yellow folders. These yellow folders had clearly defined edges but blurred-together names; they hovered somewhere close to the right side of my forehead but slightly above it, lost in a blind fringe.
I awoke with a headache the day my laptop died, and it has refused to recede. I’ve had a lot of reading to do and been overtaken with anxiety since I’ve been unable to take notes except in written, paper, form. My thinking has become linear and I realise I’m not entirely used to it. The pressure to internalise all of this material and remember everything now is making my headache worse.
After flatlining, the laptop actually responded to artificial resuscitation but I have been told that the medium-to-longterm prognosis is bad. So we are making the most of every day we have left together.
Today I went out and bought a monstrous backup hard drive. The muscles around my cheekbones and mouth relaxed for the first time since the emergency (I hadn’t realised they had been all pinched together). I experienced a warm, flowing sensation inside my body (not pee or other bodily fluid: something much more ethereal and life-affirming).
Your life is made up of experiences: your music, your memories, your information. As that collection grows, so does the need to save your life.**
I am disgusted with myself for buying into this.
* Microserfs, Douglas Coupland, 1995. ** Printed on the packaging of my new external hard drive.
Artist Vanessa Beecroft, best known for her performative installations of naked, or semi-naked women, is a pertinent artist to think about in relation to the aesthetics of the crowd.
At the heart of this is the very question of the aesthetic, or the look, of the crowd (as seen from outside it) versus any potential agency it might have, which seems strictly limited within Beecroft’s work. The women on display in Beecroft’s installations are typically tall, thin creatures, their ranks reminiscent of fetish photography, fashion, porn, fascism and science fiction in varying measures.
Now that Beecroft’s predeliction has shifted from spectatorship of the Aryan blonde body to the black female body (as found in Sudan, a body sited within a particular racial and geopolitical discourse), it seems she has finally moved a fetish too far.
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So there are two distinct things that are interesting here - the visual and what it represents.
(The trajectory runs from attention data > interest cloud > XXL attention profile).
This represents APML: attention profiling mark up language. (APML is a proposed standard that allows users to share their own personal attention profile and compress all forms of attention data into one portable file format that can be traded between ‘attention seekers and givers’).
The internet is coming up with some intriguing new forms of visual culture to respresent what’s been described and imagined as ‘the crowd’ or ‘the masses’. This runs from the conventional idea of the crowd as a stupid-to-dangerous social ‘blob’ and the dangers of ‘groupthink’, to optimistic ideas of collective intelligence such as James Suroweicki’s The Wisdom of Crowds. It comes back to the old debate of populism. That is, elitism.
I missed the boat on this one but it’s still a great idea and worthy cause. Not to mention an interesting experiment in ‘collective intelligence’…
There’s a lack of art/artist info on Wikipedia, and we’re often too busy to find the time to contribute. So, we’re setting aside one day where a crew of people collectively drop serious knowledge into wikipedia about art. From your favorite notable artwork, artist or exhibition, to our soon-to-be-famous peers. We’ll also add structural links to alumni schools and categories like collective art groups, non profit orgs, etc.<br>
The day is Saturday January 26th: an afternoon on the internet quietly enriching the public domain. We imagine groups of 2-4 people around tables across the country, bottomless coffee cups fueling the discussions, fact checking, and troubleshooting. Ideally lots of “oh, that person worked with X, I’ll make a page for them, link me up.” There will also be a lot of online chatting across coasts. Video chats if bandwidth permits.
Get the full info here
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‘I quit Facebook.’
This was announced to me during a lull in conversation during my lunch break yesterday. G (not the same G mentioned previously) said it with a certain determination, a certain set of the jaw, and carried through with a hint of pride. Something like the way would announce giving up cigarettes, except with more certitude and confidence, like this was a particularly nasty and worthless habit and he was particularly certain he would feel no need to return to it.
Last night I saw the film This is England.
I’d heard good things and generally was not disappointed - was a very well directed, superbly-acted skinhead flick, to be reductive about it. Given my interest in nostalgia and collective memory, particularly in constructed memories and the collision of the pop with the political, I was interested in how the texture of Thatcher’s England would be portrayed. It was actually fairly intoxicating - Rubik’s Cubes, Buckaroo, clock radios and 80s fashion-fashion-fashion was interspersed with the Falklands war and miner’s protests. It was kind of gorgeous.
The kind of nostalgia used in the film portrays the issues (nationalism/ racism and its associated nasties) as entities discrete in time, that can be reflected on from the same comfortable distance as Doc Martens, Culture Club eyeliner and clunky analogue technology. Skinny jeans have made a comeback in recent years, so maybe this is an unfair assessment. Does ideology get recycled with fashion or is it an empty recuperation?
The throwing of the flag into the sea was an implausible closing gesture… it did strike me though that most of the significant action in the film took place within the timespan of one little boy’s haircut, which seemed accidentally, significantly poignant.
A show at the Whitney I’m sorry I’m missing. More here
Image: Richard Serra, Television Delivers People, 1973
Richard Florida was the keynote speaker at a Creative City Regions conference in October, hosted by the Dublin Region Authority and the Dublin Employment Pact. (Info on the conference here)
Florida’s presentation didn’t say anything he hasn’t said before, but the North American, evangelical-influenced delivery was extremely impressive. He is at points very persuasive in his thesis of what the ‘Creative Economy’ is and what it needs. He paraphrased the conference chair in his diagnosis of the ‘Knowledge Economy’ (old hat terminology now) as being “the last gasp of the industrial age”.
However, while the conference was eager to attach Florida’s prestige to the proceedings, the presentations that followed him (in his absence, having jetted off to another conference) showed a notable difference in their opinions/ agendas. The talk was all about the Knowledge Economy, not the Creative Economy: even the DRA website fudged the issue by describing the conference as addressing ‘the creative knowledge economy’.
Florida himself is part of a broader trend in culture where economics is becoming ‘pop’: described as a public intellectual (and he has earned a PhD so I don’t wish to imply he is in any way underqualified), his manner of delivery draws on that of the motivational speaker, informed by the legacy of North American television and evangelicism.
In Ireland, Eddie Hobbs and David McWilliams have become similarly vocal pundits in the national media, particularly McWilliams, whose economic background has seeped into a large scale social trendforescasting. He is particularly fond of coining neologisms (Breakfast Roll Man, Decklanders, the Pope’s Children, etc – see his books and TV programmes, The Pope’s Children and The Generation Game). From this perspective, the field of economics is undeniably more enmeshed in mainstream popular culture than it has previously been.
Richard Florida visited Ireland in October 2007.
See www.creativeclass.com and www.creativeclass.typepad.com
A full report on the conference will be published in the Visual Artist’s Newsheet, January 2008
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I’ve been reading up quite a lot lately on pop economics, and am particularly interested in the emotional and irrational side of it, as well as the visual culture it generates. Somewhere along the line I came across this charming-sounding idea, the ‘personal hedgehog concept’ - see graphic. (full blog post is here, apparently is a thought authored by one Jim Collins in a book titled Good to Great)
There are plans in Milwaukee to build a public sculpture of the Fonz, the character from hit TV show Happy Days based in the city.
Visit Milwaukee, a non-profit group that promotes the city as a tourism and convention destination, is leading an effort to raise $85,000 to commission the statue. So far, Visit Milwaukee has raised $45,000, and the group is confident it will meet its timetable of unveiling a bronze Fonz in 2008, said Dave Fantle, the agency’s vice president of public relations. The agency already has contacted four artists and hopes to choose a sculptor by the end of October, he said. Visit Milwaukee got the idea of a Fonzie statue from TV Land, a cable network that broadcasts reruns of vintage shows. TV Land has donated six sculptures commemorating memorable TV events or characters to various cities, such as Mary Richards (Mary Tyler Moore). All six sculptures are from shows mainly popular in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, in keeping with TV Land’s focus on its baby boomer audience.
So this potential statue seems to represent a doubling of nostalgia, the twinning of the desire for a past located in fiction: the Happy Days sitcom was produced in the 70s and 80s, in a setting two decades earlier.
See here for a vox pop of opinions from Milwaukee residents.
It’s got it all: a council, an artist and a packet of regeneration money.
There is a lot of discussion currently happening in Ireland about new public art policies. There is a rash of symposia, seminars and conferences, which I believe to be very valuable but can be a source of fatigue as well as creative sustenance. Sometimes too I am suspicious of these talk shows and what they really hope to achieve. I have however participated in a number of them as I believe it’s important to try to make a contribution to a public discourse, and I can’t deny that for a day’s work I definitely get paid better to talk about art than to make it.
I think it’s generally accepted at this point in Ireland that many mistakes have been made with the public art commissioned in the past. The image that frequently comes to mind with this is the image of a semi-abstract or semi-figurative piece of sculpture that is generally uncomfortably sited, sometimes disowned or vandalised. Moving from the rubric of site-specificity, in the eighties in the States this occurrence was known as the ‘turd on the plaza’ or ‘plop art’. The question of why these artworks failed however has arguable not really been tackled. Is it the fault of the artist, the artwork, the site? Even the commissioner?
It worries me that in the moves towards making public art more temporary and ‘community’-oriented that nothing or little in the approach towards the commissioning of the work will really change, that the problems of the past will remain unexamined and fundamentally unsolved. There is no quick fix. It also worries me that the language of this discourse has grown up very quickly and terms get used interchangeably by different communities of interest. Some problems I have:
- This seminar asks the question Is this type of activity sufficient as an arts occurrence in itself, or as an opportunity to interact with the public? I really believe that this is a very difficult and unhelpful idea of how this kind of practice operates. We have to move towards an understanding that works towards ‘both’ rather than ‘either/or’. The relationship of the ‘public’, ‘audience’ or ‘community’ is fundamental to this work. Somewhere between the artist and the audience lies the work, the practice, and this is what we need to be talking about. The public commission should neither be weighted in favour of ‘the artist’ nor ‘the public’ – it should privilege the work itself.
- The ongoing problem of ‘plop art’. If no discussion happens about the quality of practice – whether this is to with the quality of engagement between artist and physical or social site in the reception or creation of the work – there is a risk that the ‘community’ becomes the new site for plop art rather than the public square. Just because the artwork is temporary doesn’t mean that the criteria for engagement, or the sense of responsibility, should be more lax. The openness of commissioners and local authorities to different forms of temporary works should be welcomed and applauded, but cautiously.
- Something unusual is happening currently in art practice where there is some possibility of shared space between mainstream art practice (gallery based, socially engaged practice) and community art practice. Recent texts and projects by writers and curators such as Grant Kester and Mary Jane Jacob seem to offer the possibility of convergence in the discourse between these two divergent spheres. This possibility is intriguing, beguiling, and deeply challenging. Are the points of reference, the values in the work, moving from the same space?
- Another relatively new trend is the development of ‘public art’ as a kind of specialisation. It remains to be deeply examined what is meant by ‘public art’ – is it solely a question of public money? Is Arts Council–funded work that is sited in a publicly-funded gallery somehow inherently less ‘public’? And what are the implications of working as a state-funded ‘public artist’?
Tetris (Тетрис) was originally designed and programmed by Alexey Pajitnov in June 1985, while working for the Dorodnicyn Computing Centre of the Academy of Science of the USSR in Moscow. The Soviet bureaucracy licensed and managed Tetris, and advertised it with the slogan “From Russia with Love” (on NES: “From Russia With Fun!”). Because he was employed by the Soviet government, Pajitnov did not receive royalties. Pajitnov, together with Vladimir Pokhilko, moved to the United States in 1991 and founded the Tetris Company with Henk Rogers.
Thanks to J who recently told me about the Soviet origins of tetris. I find this completely fascinating. She also made a reference to how it specifically addressed a thought-to-be feminine/ domestic psychology, but I haven’t been able to find out anything on this. This was what really got me hooked as we were talking about repetitive labour/ leisure activities - she had Tetris and I had needlepoint embroidery - which is also based on a grid system. Very curious.
It’s not the first time I’ve heard about the flourishing of leisure activities in Soviet Russia. Since time had no monetary value, there was space for people to develop rich interior lives. As my granny used to say, some people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.
(mental note - check out William Moskoff)
Cadbury’s Wispa is being reintroduced, following a period of extensive consumer campaigning (online petitions, stage storming at Glastonbury…)
On Facebook, there are 93 ‘Bring Back Wispa’ groups with almost 14,000 members. Feelings for the retro chocolate bar run as strongly on MySpace and Bebo. During the 1980s Cadbury used a string of actors and actresses to publicise the Wispa bar: Ruth Madoc of Hi-de-Hi!, Nigel Hawthorne and Paul Eddington of Yes Minister and Windsor Davies from It Ain’t Half Hot Mum were among the celebrities who appeared in the Wispa campaigns. The Wispa will sell for a recommended price of 42p per bar. Its 1983 launch price was just 16p [UK prices]
The Wispa was introduced in the year I was born, 1981, and phased out sometime in the early 2000s. Wikipedia has since told me that ‘Subtypes of this bar included Wispa Gold (caramel filling), Wispa Bite (caramel and biscuit filling), Wispaccino (coffee filling) and Wispa Mint (mint layer).’ None of which I recall but it’s only the basic one they will bring back anyway. (It’s being called ‘Classic‘)
I never really liked Wispas but I’m sure I’ll partake of one, all the better to remember memories and imaginings that aren’t really mine.
Image: 80s icons - Sky
Here’s an interesting one: apexart invites creatives to challenge the “TV is not good enough for me” attitude by making a 30-second spot promoting…. them.
- Why don’t museums and galleries advertise on TV? Why don’t people in the arts tell the truth about how much TV they watch? Help bring the art world in touch with the real world.
- Submissions will be presented on ustream.com, where the public will vote on their favorite commercial with the winning commercial aired on WNET-TV and WNYC-TV in New York and the winner receiving a cash prize ($1,500).
- All submitted commercials will be shown continuously in the exhibition space at apexart in New York City from January 9 to February 16, 2008.
- Final date to be received at apexart is December 7, 2007, in format MP4 on DVD.
- Help us spread the word to ad agencies, ad types, videographers, artists, and others. Submissions from all countries are encouraged.
apexart, 291 Church Street, NYC, 10013, USA. www.apexart.org Email info@apexart.org with AD PROJECT in the subject line
‘pop culture is the collective dream of the unconscious’
This acute observation is from Adam Lawrence, a Rolling Stone journalist played by John Travolta in a 1985 film called Perfect. In the film, he travels to Los Angeles to investigate a drug case and decides to write an exposé of the health-club craze of the 1980s. He sets out to trash the fitness craze as just a replacement of the shallow singles bar scene of the 1970s. He even has a title in mind: “Looking for Mr. Goodbody.” As he researches his story, Adam meets Jessie (Jamie Lee Curtis), a sexy fitness instructor who has little use for scribes like him and bad history with reporters. Adam charms the reluctant Jessie, and before long the hot couple is ‘working out together–in more ways than one’. Suddenly Adam is faced with a quintessential dilemma of journalism: Can he be Jessie’s lover and still ridicule her friends and workplace?
I saw this now pretty obscure film at about 2am one morning when there was nothing else on and I was most likely suffering from a bout of insomnia. I don’t remember picking up on this particular quote but I do remember thinking it was pretty remarkable for a mainstream film to have such critical insight into contemporary culture. Lawrence/ Travolta’s quote came up in conversation with Jesse (a different Jesse, with a different spelling) as we were preparing for an interview about her work. It was only when she described the film in more detail as we were actually doing the interview that I realised I had seen it too.
This struck me at the time as a really amazing coincidence, and it still does. It always surprises me the sense of connection that I feel with people through this kind of memory, the surprisingly rich and nuanced texture of it. And it seems to describe something about how popular culture might operate as a kind of reservior of collective memory… somehow Bosco, a particular TV advert, a momentary fashion fad, can really locate a personal biography within an era.
This is of course cynically exploited by the endless recycling of ‘I (heart) 1970s’ and ‘Top Ten X’ shows; remakes of 70s, 80s TV shows as films; and so on and so on. But in a roundabout way, this only reinforces the texture of the quote itself, and I wonder about its potential.
I feel speechless already.
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