A Different Point of View.
Photos by Simon Thorogood.
The Schönbuchturn, a lookout tower in the Schönbuch Nature Reserve in Baden-Württemberg, affords stunning 360-degree panoramas of the Swabian landscape. Yet, as well as an impressive physical structure, the tower also serves as a conceptual device that reminds us to perpetually re-orientate our view of the world.
The Schönbuch is Baden-Württemberg’s oldest nature reserve and one of southern Germany’s largest enclosed forests. It is home to a variety of wildlife, including many rare and protected species.
The Schönbuchturn itself was completed in 2018, as a result of a student competition at the Hochschule für Technik, Stuttgart, and built on the Stellberg Hill, near the towns of Herrenberg and Boblingen. Via corkscrew steps, visitors can make their way up the structure and contemplate the scenery from one of three viewing platforms. At the top, views are spectacular and depending on the weather, one can see for many miles in all directions, taking in the Schlossberg Plateau, the Hecken and Korngäu plains, the Swabian Alps, and the Black Forest.
The glued larch wood and steel form is designed to sway, with movement becoming increasingly perceptible the higher one ascends. On a very windy day the experience can be quite unnerving, but even on the clear and relatively still day as evidenced here, the climb to the very top was still unsettling.
And so the Schönbuchturn is analogous as a medium to theoretically see things differently. Here, the higher one wishes to climb, the more one seeks to alter one’s vantage point, the further one looks out, the more challenging the task can become, and the more one’s balance can be upset by the sway in the wind.
But, as per the remarkable views from the top, the effort is worthwhile. Whatever the weather may be, and whatever the mindset may be, the dividends can be revelation, variation, transition and improvisation. That’s got to be worth the climb.
Structural Adjustment.
Photograph by Simon Thorogood.
The current renovation work on the Jubilee Column in Stuttgart has transformed it from historical memorial to something more abstracted and intriguing. No longer a conventional public monument, the dressed structure now presents itself as a catechism, inviting us to question the nature and purpose of public buildings, spaces and interventions. It stands as a reminder that, like the column itself, our take on the world should be perpetually subject to renovation and adjustment.
The very first time I visited Stuttgart, some 16 years or so ago, I remember it being a miserable day, with a bleached out white sky. I remember, too, being captivated by the Jubiläumssäule, or Jubilee Column, in the city’s Schlossplatz. It was undergoing extensive renovation works and was covered in a steely web of scaffolding poles, walkways and ladders.
The memorial, about 35 metres in height, was built between 1841-1846 to commemorate the 60th birthday of King Wilhelm I of Württemberg. The column has four reliefs to its base depicting historical scenes, flanked by four allegorical figures, and with two attendant water fountains. The pillar is crowned with a figurative sculpture of Concordia, the Roman Goddess of virtue, loyalty, peace, justice, honour and happiness.
As it so happened, I was in Stuttgart a week or so ago on much the same type of day as before – a cold, bleak day with the same bleached out sky. Strangely enough the Jubilee Column was undergoing exactly the same renovations as before, with the same imposing scaffolding framework in place. Once again, the column’s details, reliefs and figurines could only be partially determined through the metallic mesh, which assumed differing compositions and configurations as one wandered around it.
It struck me that my engagement with the Jubilee Column has always been a peculiar one, where I have only really regarded it during episodes of restoration. For me, it has remained a strange mediation – not quite monument, not quite renovation, not quite architecture, not quite community project, not quite sculpture, not quite art; yet all of these things at the same time.
As a delusion, fabrication or chimera even, a ‘thing’ composed of different parts and understandings, the monument encapsulates all that I subscribe to in the arts. It conveys a particular alchemy conjured up through contradiction and unfinishedness; a thing having no clear starting or end point. But, more than just a compelling physical structure, its real potency is as conceptual trigger or motivating idea that can take us ‘elsewhere.’
If the monument is therefore hypothetical, of course it is not alone in this operation. Many other buildings in the city might function similarly, where they are not necessarily just examples of civic architecture – a town hall, a shopping centre, or a train station, for example.
So, the Domkirche St. Eberhard in Königstraße, is no less a concept than the distended Jubilee Column. Not only is it a refined modernist Catholic church, re-built in 1955 for local parishioners to attend mass again following its destruction by bombing in WW2, it also serves as a conduit for spiritual and philosophical energy and interpretation. The church provides physical shelter for its congregation but it also affords conceptual harborage for collective belief, faith, and matters of the mind. Its role, then, is to administer imaginary affordances – arguably the principal function of any religious site or place of worship, or any art gallery, theatre, cinema, or library.
And, as an aside, if the responsibility of religious architecture (or perhaps all architecture) is to make visible the invisible, is its task also to render the visible invisible?
Sometimes however, perhaps due to conditions of extended familiarity, we can fail to acknowledge a building, development or form as something more than architectural exercise, however modest, imposing, unsightly or visually impressive it may be. We can forget that a building, especially where this might be implied by a lesser-seen interior, can purposefully prevail as figment, premise, or hypothesis.
And that is why the ‘vested’ Jubilee Column resonated with me so much. On the two separate occasions I experienced it, I found the monument to be neither quite one thing nor another. But, through its eccentricity it became something far more stimulating, something far more expedient, and something far more useful.
I am reminded, then, how important exercising one’s imagination is as a medium of invention and discovery. As we might agree upon, a creative procedure is very often not about fully understanding something, but about a strategic encounter that is able to reveal or ‘renovate’ something within us. Engaging Martin Heidegger’s notion of ‘stimmung,’ or attunement, the aggrandized Jubilee Column can immediately speak of many other things in the world - the appalling and ongoing conflict in Ukraine, for instance.
But for me, the monument is distinguished as negotiator of an uncertain relationship between an uncertain structure and an uncertain observer facing an uncertain future.
The Wild Ones.
Photos by Simon Thorogood.
The German Swabian-Alemannic Fastnacht or Fasnet carnival, as featured in a previous post, culminates in the Fasching or ‘eve of Lent’ festival.
With pagan folk traditions that hark back to Medieval times, Fasching serves as a last coming together of local Fastnacht communities before Lent – the 40 day stretch of prayer, fasting and almsgiving, which represents an important religious observance in the German liturgical calendar. The original imperative for the carnival, the processions, costumes and masks was a concerted, communal effort to drive out evil spirits during the dark days of winter. For Catholic towns and communities, Fastnacht is a prominent public holiday period.
Then, as now, the carnival is conducted with great zeal, becoming the focal point of a particular host village or district every weekend throughout the Fastnacht season. Although, street processions are highly visual spectacles and make for great family entertainment, there can be an undercurrent of menace or impropriety that permeates proceedings.
Here, there are clues within the name. Some believe ‘Fasching’ is derived from the German word Fastenschank, meaning the last serving of alcoholic beverages before Lent. Others, maintain the name stems from an old word fasen, meaning to be foolish, wild, or silly. The word, fasnach, closely approximated to fastnacht, roughly translates as “night of being foolish.”
In fact, all three interpretations are legitimate. But, the imminent abstinence of drink and fasting prompts many devotees to overindulge whilst they have license to, and hence become foolish, wild, or silly. Once dressed up, fuelled by alcohol often consumed quickly, and roused by cumulative ardour, crowds readily assume the rubric of ‘wilde leute’ or wild people.
Interestingly, the final Fasching Carnival parade in mid-February can register quite different energy levels from festivities at the very start of Fastnacht. Whilst Fasching itself can evidence increased conspicuous indulgence on one hand, it can reveal a noticeable decrease in carnival vitality on the other, as preceding weekends of merrymaking (since Epiphany of January 6th) takes its physical and psychological toll.
But, to reprise the concluding point in my previous post on this subject, Fastnacht arguably exemplifies the very best attributes of creative culture. Essentially, it is a framework is which to exercise ‘difference.’ It represents a unique opportunity to connect with others, to dress up, to assume alternative personas, to be misplaced, to challenge commonly-held assumptions, to ask complicated questions of oneself and society, and to test out being someone, something, and somewhere else.
Fastnacht can remind us how crucial ‘opting out’ is for us, in some form or shape, and for some period or other. It also tells us how critical the arts and humanities are as both instrument and portal to enhanced human existences, storytelling, and the crafting of surrogate worlds and mindsets.
And, in much the same way that UNESCO awarded the Basel Fastnacht ‘Intangible Cultural Heritage’ status, singular places, practices and mechanisms of ‘otherness’ should be celebrated and nurtured as mediums for divergence and variance.
Such places have traditionally included enlightened universities, art schools, design colleges, theatre companies, or local community groups, to give just a few examples. However, regrettably these are the very places that appear at risk of being devalued by a world seemingly focusing on standards of acquisition and certainty over rituals of emprise and conjecture. Surely, such operation is foolish and silly.
Door Frames.
Photos by Simon Thorogood.
Wandering the back streets of the small city of Rottenburg am Neckar, I was struck by the number of houses not especially modernized.
In an otherwise affluent city, there was something both charming and comforting about the idea that the owners consider “this door is okay. I trust this door, I’ll stick with it.”
The doorways served as a measure of recent historical architectural styles, but without being a conspicuous expression of vintage or period. They just were.
Aside from architectural features, the doors and windows held other meaning – as portals to other worlds and other lives. They spoke about the idea of ‘passing through’ something; representing challenges, borders, conduits, outlets, points of departure, of entering and exiting, of emergence, of escape, and new beginnings.
As psychological representations, then, they are compelling and can tell us something about the particular conscious and unconscious doorways we periodically seek (or avoid) in life. From Janus, the Roman god of doorways, beginnings, endings, transitions and time, to Sigmund Freud’s notion of doors of psychoanalysis, doors and gateways have been used throughout a history of human culture as metaphor, symbol and storytelling device.
In the 1972 film The Godfather Francis Ford Coppola reputedly used doors to articulate and separate different characters, existences and status within the Corleone mafia family. In classical music, Britta Byström’s Ten Secret Doors (2010) is composed of ten interconnecting movements (or doorways) each with distinct sound-changes. In architecture, we might reference Lorenzo Ghiberti’s imposing bronze Doors of Paradise of the Baptistery of San Giovanni in Florence (1452), and in the fine arts, Marc Chagall’s Cubist Cemetery Gate (1917), has much to say to us again within the context of the war in Ukraine.
No doubt like many, I am engaged in a perpetual procedure of door searching – the ‘right’ door into something, the ‘right’ door out of something, and identifying those that can be safely left ajar.
But in the midst of such operation, and any anxiety this might entail, perhaps we need to occasionally remind ourselves as per the doors of Rottenburg that “this door is okay. I trust this door, I’ll stick with it.”
Conversion Therapy.
Photographs by Simon Thorogood.
After a few weeks of colourless and drab weather, the landscape and one’s own mindset has been adjusted by the fresh snowfall.
Although temporary, the fleecy blanket changes much and difference abounds. Light levels are adjusted; sounds are both muffled and amplified; the blanched ground slips into the ashen sky; tracks and movements of animals and machines are revealed; and a familiarity with surroundings is modified.
One can engage with one’s environment anew, and the task of the arts and humanities is entrusted to the fields and trees around a small village in Baden-Württemberg.
The (Un)Possessive Article.
Photo by Simon Thorogood, courtesy of the Imperial War Museum.
“One must of necessity, criticize, break-up, even destroy in order to discover.”
– Mervyn Levy. The Future of Art Schools Report, 1961.
Ownership can be defined as an act, state, condition, or case of legal possession and control over goods, chattels, deeds, property, or assets. Whilst ownership is a relatively easy thing to specify theoretically, through a dictionary definition for example, in reality it can be something much harder to discern. Can we learn, therefore, to divert from conventional concepts of possession, and to converge instead on egalitarian ideals of ‘open custodianship?’
A common agreement and understanding of ownership and acquisition can be complicated due to differing perspectives and interpretation. Depending on views held by individuals or multiple shareholders, there is much scope for both nuanced and conspicuous differences in meaning and value.
So, already we see capacity for ownership to be disrupted in the way it is presumed and distributed. Where it is possible to buy, inherit, earn, win, accrue, barter, gift, transfer, lose, steal or forcibly occupy holdings, ‘custody’ can also be traded for other forms and means of proprietorship. In this sense, ownership becomes a self-propagating entity.
Where impressions of ownership may be conveniently divvied up into concepts and categories of ‘mine,’ ‘yours,’ ‘ours,’ or ‘theirs,’ it is rarely conducted quite so neatly, or so orderly. Not least, this is because ownership can implicate physical and tangible states as well as abstract and intangible states.
Where there might be a perceived dominance of physical manifestations of ownership, conceptual presence is certainly as powerful. Abstracted or ‘absent’ notions of possession and ownership may, in fact, challenge conventional cultures of objectification and materialism, and help focus awareness on what is left behind, discarded, or ignored. Absence, therefore, becomes a highly potent force for renewal.
What we currently witness in Ukraine can certainly be determined as an experiment of acquisition. The Kremlin apparently believe Russia (a country of over 17 million square kilometres) has legitimate grounds to possess another sovereign state by force, (a country of approximately 600,000 square kilometres). Indubitably, they do not.
Strip Show.
If we step back and take a balanced view on things, prior to invasion there were grounds, perhaps, for Russia to express considerable displeasure with a perceived encroachment of the West and NATO. But, with subsequent military incursion, where soldiers have crossed borders, have encircled cities, have killed citizens, have destroyed barracks, housing, shoe factories, theatres, art schools, churches, kindergartens and hospitals, this card has been discarded for good. The aggressors cannot, surely, believe this assailment exacts ‘ownership.’
So, the initiated seizure of a nation may represent an extreme end of a continuum or scale of ownership. Indeed, the reported destruction of Ukraine’s cultural heritage may well form part of a concerted strategy by the Kremlin to strip the country of a national identity and any self-proclaimed standing as an independent sovereign state.
The Russian military have already destroyed the Donetsk Regional Drama Theatre and the Ivankiv Museum, home to the national folk art archives, which houses the work of revered Ukrainian folk artist Maria Prymachenko. Unesco has reported the damage or destruction to cultural heritage of several towns and cities, including the shelling of the Assumption Cathedral in Kharkiv, and the wrecking of a 19th-century wooden church in Viazivk. Seven world heritage sites around the country are considered to be at severe risk of being targeted as the conflict intensifies.
If destruction to national heritage continues, it will become increasingly apparent that a highly cynical form of cultural warfare, conducted alongside ‘conventional’ warfare, is being waged with intent to utterly demoralise and undermine the resolve of the Ukrainian people.
The preservation and protection of cultural heritage must be considered paramount for any enlightened civilised society. Conversely, the wanton destruction and plundering of a country’s national treasure by an external power must represent the very lowest reaches of humanity.
But, there is evidently something more at play here, and a something that might never be possessed or constrained through aggression. Intent to strip away a nation’s physical presence reveals something more powerful in its place – a spirit and determination, which ‘occupies’ the hearts and minds of those who harmonise with a higher order of kinship.
This is often never quite understood by those seeking to pilfer and dominate. Instead, convenient classification is formulated and applied to fuel the demands and narratives for base acquisition.
So, the preservation of national museums, cultural assets, and places of historic significance represents a vital symbol of defiance, whilst providing a future focus for Ukraine to recover from and variously evaluate the conflict in the years to come.
Cancel Culture.
It might be argued that we all co-exist within realms of ‘occupation’ of one form or another. These domains are populated by those engaged in economies of judgment - social media influencers, vloggers, bloggers, commentators, gossip journalism, cultural reviewers, politicians or even governments, for instance. These groups, and many others, engage judgment as a tool to secure influence and authority, whether for better or worse.
The mid-20th Century artists Jasper Johns and John Baldessari both reported trauma and anxiety as a result of how their work was professionally judged and publicly perceived. They were respectively so affected by external appraisal, that at specific points in their career they both resorted to destroying their artwork, asserting that such drastic action was necessary to allow them to recover and refocus their particular motives for being an artist.
So today, where we unite behind a comprehensive and collective rejection of aggressive action and misapplied conviction exercised by a rogue state, we might concurrently be brought to a place where we confront and challenge the basis of conspicuous and excessive ownership elsewhere. We might choose to move away from perceptible measures of ‘control’ evident in our world towards more connected and concentrated ideologies, which we can further describe as idea-assets, idea-existences, or idea-nations.
Like literary fiction, we may be reminded that ownership, and it’s representation, does not convey absolutes of reality, truth, or authority, but where it has greater capacity as agency. Accordingly, tenets of ownership may be entirely re-configured as services or mediums of distributed ‘conceptual consummates,’ reflecting a broader spectrum of emancipated criteria, ideas, agendas, approaches and people.
What the crisis in Ukraine is also advising, is that it is increasingly harder for us to adopt positions of indifference or lassitude in our everyday ‘world-building.’ We may have arrived at a point, once again, where it is no longer okay to be just ‘living’ through something, but where we need to be ‘changing’ through something.
As we witness a savage invasion unfold ‘there,’ we might be reminded how very privileged we are to employ art and culture as weapon and apparatus to disrupt perceptions of dominance ‘here.’ As a mechanism to challenge, subvert, and redefine, art also has a mission to nourish, liberate and propagate ideas for the benefit of all.
Culture and creativity, as a reflection of the world, can also be a distinctively messy or disorderly business. This mess refers not only to the use of materials employed to make things, but in the way that new ideas are intellectually conceived and the way that old ideas are actively eradicated.
Art has notably undergone profound aesthetic and philosophical evolution through periods of rejection and elimination. Much celebrated artwork of the 20th Century, for example, can be characterised as mirroring geo-political unrest and turmoil, in turn spawning some of the most dynamic examples of modern art - consider Picasso’s Guernica, for example. And when viewing such notable artworks of a time, we can often ask of them, “what is missing here?”
Certainly, if we scrutinise an evolution of artistic movements, practices and philosophies throughout a history of art, we might observe a progressive degree of disappearance and removal from displayed artworks. Perhaps, the first conspicuous aspect to be visually expunged by artists was realism. This was perhaps followed by representational objects, framed and hung compositions, brushwork and paint, the two-dimensional plane, three-dimensional forms, the gallery wall, the museum, and perhaps space itself.
This ongoing process of reduction provided the logical framework for the idealistic Conceptual Art movement of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. Here, there was emphasis on saying more with less, and a dialogue in which artists sought to eliminate representation of the outside world from a tradition of flat surface or plastic form, and instead situate a work directly in the mind.
Relinquishment, as the arts continue to show, can be as advantageous to reasoning and culture as any progressive augmentation of material objects, entities, tools, or spaces. It can also be a useful way of displacing oneself in the world.
Where we recognise conventional or endorsed operational frameworks of a particular discipline, so in turn we can begin to understand what exactly of this framework we may wish to dismantle, and why. Thus, the importance of a process of elimination in the formulation of new creative languages and mediums becomes stronger.
Learning how to subvert, how to abandon, and how to eradicate is something that more radically inclined art schools and colleges have traditionally provided for society, as uncommon places that positively capture and harness ‘disturbance.’
Removal Services.
“Tenets of ownership may be entirely re-configured as services or mediums of distributed ‘conceptual consummates,’ reflecting a broader spectrum of emancipated criteria, ideas, agendas, approaches and people.”
If we recognise the value of such social laboratories, and what they do when supported and staffed well, then other non-creative institutions may consider how they analogously function. Where relevant, how might they learn to operate as ‘agencies of disappearance,’ where they too may become positively empowered through strategic ‘amnestic practice?’
Might this permit them and their audiences a particular autonomy and dexterity to find futures differently? Again, as the arts show, where something is surrendered, healthy conditions of unfamiliarity can arise and new discoveries are made in the space where the something once was. We can also learn differently about what it means to be human.
As a largely conceptual initiative, such reasoning may help nourish shifts away from perpetual engagements with physical production and ownership of stuff and stimulate awakenings to a distributed idea of belonging.
So, where the formation of culture corresponds with episodes of turmoil or destruction, what new manifestations of instructive culture might we experience now? What kinds of cultural reaction will there be to the Covid-19 pandemic, or the invasion of Ukraine when they are absent, have faded, or no longer current?
Most certainly, this period will be extensively audited and hypothesised in pending annals of history, but the arts and culture should also provide a cogent lens for an extensive process of review, entirely necessary for history to continue to ‘occupy’ our present and everyday consciousness.
Leave Of Absence.
Idealism, then, has clear legitimacy and capability to change a world, and provides a clear licence for us to leave out what need not be there anymore.
Where the arts have provided a rich catalogue of leaving out something that no-one else had previously thought of leaving out before, similarly how might the world learn to leave out things that it thought it could not?
Whilst admittedly a simplistic retort, leaving out things such as gratuitous material acquisition, commercial holding monopolies, property development consortiums, tech conglomerates, immense military arsenals, or conceits of global expansionism, to name just a few things, seems a really good place to start.
Mourning Dress.
Photo by Simon Thorogood.
“And so, on Thursday 24 February 2022, we stand here again, clothed in nothing but the shreds of our lost illusions.”
Not yet out of the woods from the Covid-19 pandemic, and within the midst of a climate emergency, we find ourselves again pugnaciously roused from a commodious existence by the actions of a rogue state. At such critical moments, we are reminded as to both the privileged and fragile nature of our everyday existences.
Damaged Stock.
In such a short time, there has been so much unified castigation of Russia’s cynical and, of course, entirely illegal invasion of Ukraine, a free and sovereign state. This primitive action, belonging as it does to totalitarianism of the 20th Century, can only be denounced and will do nothing to advance any altruistic material or philosophical condition for the world.
Positively speaking, it can be hoped that this absurd and delusional act of aggression will unite peoples and governments around the world in demanding that that no state or figurehead can ever assume such imperious capacity again.
Although we have been at this point in history many times before, there has nonetheless been a dramatic show of solidarity across the world. This gives us fuel to continue to optimistically engineer agendas and enterprises that bind people and nations in progressive and mutually benevolent ways.
However, it may yet to be seen how this present assailment might actuate any forms of regression and recession for us in the years to come, and where any abrogating ramifications of Brexit, the Covid-19 pandemic and climate change may be further convoluted.
Whilst Russia will have to answer for its actions in due course, the West will also need to reflect upon its own point of compass and notion of global stewardship.
Whilst perhaps a simplistic view, it might be argued that the tenets of Western capitalist economies are determined by material production, free market enterprise, re-investment opportunity, and capital acquisition tied to private ownership. Yet, we might now pause to review how such mercantilism may prove temptingly malleable to those who would exploit any ‘moral myopia’ of the contented West. And, it is important to remember that these same tenets can serve both our freedoms and our repressions.
We might concede that a timeworn capitalist world model that many of us have inherited, or in which we reside conveniently, although sometimes uncomfortably so, can seemingly converge on the deification of power, influence and ownership. These are the very same things that Putin or any other autocrat trades in, although to abhorrent excess.
Open To Question.
Therefore, we can ask ourselves if we really want to renew the lease on this type of world. Whilst again simplistic, it may be the evolving domain of the arts, culture and mediums of benevolence tied to the evolving sciences of the mind that will coalesce to enhance and propel human agency.
But if this a condensed view, we can still ask if modern creativity can expedite focus on higher levels of being for humanity, through processes or media common and instructive to everyone, and that has potential to curtain acquisitive proprietorship, consumption, and hostility.
As part of any process of moral review, reflection can require time, and insight can be a by-product of hindsight. However, operations of fortitude, courage and solidarity must always underscore our thoughts and actions, and hence profoundly instruct our futures.
Wherever we each choose to pin our geo-political tail on the donkey of humanity, we would likely all agree that state aggression of any sort represents a wholly defective ideology; a crass system that belongs to precepts and business models of centuries gone by.
So, we might be reminded as to the importance of the arts as progenitor of constructive change and redress. As a purposeful framework to challenge, test, and question our world, the arts have always provided sanctuary and freedom for us to conceive, communicate and connect. Here, we can ‘be’ differently through ourselves, where we are the medium, and where we can proudly declare “today I am this painting, this song, this building, this ideal; today I embody the spirit of this nation, and today I choose not to be represented by this aggressor.”
As such a powerful tool, the arts should be emphatically championed and financed far more than they are, throughout every society, and at every level. We will need to sustain and fortify new places, new personnel, new conditions and new channels that authenticate knowledge differently and the appropriate freedoms required to do this.
The ‘question as instrument’ will remain the principal driver of wisdom and social advancement, so it is surely imperative that we further novel and adaptable ‘rehearsal’ spaces to conduct questioning, even where this may be difficult or uncomfortable to do.
Accordingly places of learning, at all levels and for all ages, will need to consider how they facilitate and apply more, not less, means and settings of questioning, more mechanisms of testing, and more measures of kindness.
But, we all must be complicit in an effort to uphold nurturing and liberated spaces in which to engage positive difference and re-evaluation. Even within places of ‘enlightenment,’ it may require further collective determination to privilege idealism over models of conservatism or reversion. It may be the philosophical (re)occupation of ‘wild’ ideas that will come to (re)determine places of guidance, instruction, information, and networking for us.
Displacement.
Dreaming has always had a direct effect on how humans think and what they do. So, as a political activity, imagination generates or evokes novel situations, ideas and experiences in the mind – variously discussed in philosophy as qualia, meaning ‘what kind’ or ‘what sort’ of subjective, conscious experience.
Imagining, then, is not just passive apprehension or act, but rather a subjective form of activism and advocacy.
For those fleeing a besieged Ukraine, as well as many others around the world escaping persecution, clothes promptly shift their status from fashionable or stylistic garments to urgent and utilitarian forms of ‘livery.’ These clothes quickly speak a different language from that we routinely understand in our own day-to-day lives. They alter a conventional narrative and convey a situation ‘there’ that the wearers wish were not true, against a situation ‘here’ in which we wear clothes to tell stories that we wish were true.
This theme is reflected in Hussein Chalayan’s ‘After Words’ Autumn Winter collection of 2000, which dealt with concepts of human displacement through regional conflict. As part of the show’s finale, models re-appropriated chair covers and a wooden coffee table, as both garments to walk away in and sole earthly possessions. This performance is being played out again as reality, as the past occupies and violates the present once more.
If we understand creativity as advancing insight, awareness and expertise, we may correspondingly experience products, outcomes and forms of ‘mobilisation’ as amalgamations of theory, analysis, process, responsibility, activism and storytelling.
Here, we might become philosophical conductors of compassionate ‘connected affordances,’ rather than as any physical manifestation of materiel, incursion and violation, that we currently witness in Ukraine. This perceptivity is not always determined through geographical locale, but always cultivated and communicated through belief and consciousness.
And, as we find ourselves, again, at a very peculiar point in history, not only must we all become more kindhearted, respectful and supportive, but cultural and learning institutions may need to become far more politically charged, energised and overtly radical. By doing so, they must learn to vigorously wrestle back agendas of ‘risky crusades’ that successive episodes of mental and financial recession may have expedited.
Indeed, this may prove necessary to tenaciously write themselves back into the conceptual and humanitarian blueprints of the future, essential to the (re)construction of all our tomorrows.
‘Naught Couture.’
Photo by Simon Thorogood.
“Life is an illusion. I am held together in the nothingness of art.”
– Anselm Kiefer
We have heard much about the decline of the high-street in recent times and corresponding disappearance of some big name retail and department stores from city centres. But can loss help us find something anew, and something that might, in some ways, have been ‘there’ all along?
Places and Settings.
The Covid pandemic has certainly accelerated a course of store and branch closures, with pending reduction of some flagship store space allied to a swift migration to online shopping.
Many of these disappearing stores perhaps functioned as social barometers of a particular class, clientele, and time. They also sanctioned a very particular culture of ‘browsing,’ the wandering around floors and departments (sometimes purposefully, sometimes less so), amongst other shoppers and amid a range of arranged chattels and merchandise.
Parallels between browsing in a store and wandering around a gallery, museum, or cathedral are clear and obvious, and certainly many high-end brands have long played with the notion of what a retail space can be, or what it can look like – the shop transmuted as gallery, shrine or church, for example.
Absenteeism.
But, as we consider any heightened status of a shop or outlet, and the things set within, we might correspondingly consider the idea of what is not there, or what is absent. Where shops tend to not deal with issues of absence, largely for commercial reasons, churches or temples certainly do. These often serve as mediums or sanctuaries that instruct us that ‘nothingness,’ and the abstraction and abdication of the physical artefact or setting, may be considered definitive in order to extend a reach and scope of existence.
Such interpretation can prove both significant and intriguing for fashion. A confrontation with commodities or goods that are excised or progressively ‘not there’ might, in fact, prompt us to invest in approbatory cultures of reductionism. And, as part of such a developing dialogue we can appraise what happens during any process of removal or eradication. What are we removing exactly, and why? What happens to the thing or entity being removed? Where does it go; and what fills up the ‘space’ left behind by the something no longer there?
The Presence of Fashion.
Such investigation might pose the question if conventional cultures of objectification, materialism, and consumption can be commuted by constructs of thought or deliberation as output or ‘product?’ This idea could help focus and develop awareness (Heidegger’s ‘stimmung’) on what is left behind, unnoticed, or disregarded, and how such conditions may be cultivated for creative and commercial advantage.
This point also connects to an earlier issue made about forging purposeful shifts away from conventional understandings of the ‘object-garment’ towards a conceptual (yet viable) perceptivity of the ‘idea-garment.’
Considered research and exploration in this area may yield intriguing manifestations of a concentrated ‘presence of fashion.’ The idea of presence embraces absence and inessentiality, but is also concerned with the inconspicuous value of something that is ‘there,’ but where it has just not been noticed before.
This idea can offer an intriguing opportunity for the further conceptualising of fashion (or any other manufactured product or service), but it also prevails as a commercially expedient framework for new markets that may go beyond current preoccupation with NFT’s or crypto-assets, for instance.
If precipitous states of nothingness might induce distinct forms of creative complexity, new forms of categorisation should correspondingly arise. We may see the evolution of different types of association, juxtaposition or connection, different types of language, different types of outlet, different types of personnel, and different types of consumer.
There And Not There.
“If we wish for better, more ethical, more responsible and less materially orientated outlooks, we may need to acknowledge a need to not only slow down, but to fundamentally change our relationship with time and ownership.”
A concept of immateriality and inconsequentiality is something that has been extensively explored through philosophy or religion, for example, but it is has proved a rich vein of inspiration for the arts too, especially the Conceptual Art movement of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. A little earlier, in 1958, the experimental artist Brion Gyson developed his ‘Dreamachine’ light device that stimulated transcendental experiences in a viewer. Gyson described the work as “the first art object to be seen with the eyes closed,” and which reputedly allowed users to ‘see’ their brain’s own visual cortex.
In 2022, an updated Dreamachine installation will be toured throughout the UK as part of the Unboxed festival. As part of this, Gyson’s original concept is being extended through an extensive collaboration with a neuroscientist, philosopher, art group, and a composer, that will allow audiences to engage in contemporary and collective transcendental encounters.
The team behind Dreamachine state that their intention is to instruct new art audiences in alternative states of shared awareness and experience, where they might find ‘completion’ within themselves, rather than through any external condition.
So, the Dreamachine, like many artworks and designed creative experiences of course, has consequence and influence because it asks us to question what value is, and where this might be found. But, the work also asks us to contemplate and invest in the ‘present,’ and in this very moment.
This can be useful as fashion is frequently characterised as a commercially orientated system that sustains markets, audiences and consumers in their search and appetite for the ‘next.’ If we wish for better, more ethical, more responsible and less materially orientated outlooks, we may need to acknowledge a need to not only slow down, but to fundamentally change our relationship with time and ownership, as philosophy and religion have always advocated. The very operation of ‘listening’ to the here and now, then, can represent an important claim on the future.
Returning to the theme of department stores, what was intriguing about them in their heyday, was that as well as being impressive ‘depositories of stuff,’ they offered a realm for losing oneself, and as place for illusion and dreaming. Within a rapidly changing retail landscape and marketplace, perhaps we are presented with a rare and brief occasion to radically re-evaluate what kind of setting or milieu we choose to ‘immerse’ and ‘dress’ ourselves within?
If fashion needs to develop and reprise new ways for us to ‘browse,’ then there should be concerted emphasis for this to implicate philosophical estates, not real estates.
Dream Teams.
Photo by Simon Thorogood, courtesy of Hatfield House.
“Reverie is when ideas float in our mind without reflection or regard of the understanding…”
― John Locke. Philosopher and political theorist.
With the release of a recent UNESCO report on the global decline of the creative industries, we might find ourselves moving perilously closer to a period of retreat and abdication in the Arts. To avert any such episodic failure, we need to advance and evolve cultures of visionary dreaming.
A newly published Unesco report entitled, ‘Reshaping Policies for Creativity,’ has highlighted how nearly 10 million creative jobs worldwide were lost in 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
Despite the creative industries representing one of the fastest growing economies in the world, artists, designers, their output and intellectual property can be the least respected by global business practice. Whilst the demand and consumption of cultural content markedly increased during the pandemic, correspondingly the makers of work reported finding it difficult to survive as commissioners and end users do not always want to pay commensurately for material.
As part of the very rapid migration online, many creative personnel, services, and skills were quickly re-configured, and in some cases entirely lost, through digitisation of product or service. It has been this transformation, at pace, that has destabilised an already precarious cultural ecosystem for the arts and creative sectors.
The issue may yet prove to be compounded by creative learning institutions choosing to trade riskier learning environments and ‘contingent’ teachers for more economically streamlined and convenient working models that centre around increased studentship.
Reverie of Thought.
If this development is to be arrested and reversed, we must all recognise the importance of speculating, fictionalising and dreaming in order to foster innovation and difference for education, culture and commerce.
So, if we consider the realm of dreams, we can recognise this as a complex and often disharmonised field of investigation, with no solid or unified scientific understanding in place. Perhaps the first scientific research investigations began with an extensive study by Eugene Aserinsky and Nathaniel Kleitman, at the University of Chicago in 1953, who observed dreaming occurring within REM sleep patterns.
Although, it has yet to be established if there is any primary function to dreaming, dreams nonetheless represent imaginative adventures of the mind. This can reinforce a notion that humans, as other cognitive beings, thrive on mental stimulus.
It might be, then, that dreams serve to uniquely introduce us to fantastic narratives from our unconscious and non-conscious states. By resolutely engaging with them, we are able to disengage from daily routines to develop and extend our own imagination and artistry.
Oddity Programming.
In order to sustain stimulation and piquancy, we must continually seek and invent new concepts of abnormality and variety. I call this enterprise ‘oddity programming’ – investing in divergent conditions necessary for creative, spiritual, and intellectual nourishment and intensification. Such practice will not only assist in the enhancement of our mental states but, in turn, will instruct and ‘dress’ our corporeal body and environments too.
In the midst of the Covid lockdowns, many of us had to contend with narrowed or diminished living and working environments. Yet, the human estate needs to register new and unexpected experiences to prosper. This is where dreaming, day-dreaming, and other forms of fictionalising can provide us with the necessary deviation and escape from the prosaic, whether that may implicate banality, indifference, or dilemma.
If we consider dreaming and day-dreaming as a work-out for our imaginations, we can recognise the value of this in much the same way a treadmill exercises our body. But, it is the very strangeness of dreams, as well as other means of ‘opting out’ (expressed through the arts, for instance) that can facilitate a healthy detachment from the ordinary, and provide revision to our thoughts and actions.
Dreaming Up Possibilities.
“...every act of perception is to some degree an act of creation.”
Current neuroscience research at Tufts University in Massachusetts is showing that repeatedly performing a new task or activity will actually stimulate vivid dreams and where, in turn, magnified dreaming can ardently enhance skills or tasks in our waking life. A developing theory of ‘nextup’ (Network Exploration to Understand Possibilities), also proposes that dreams orchestrate novel ways for us to explore what we have recently learnt or ‘felt.’
This might tell us that expressions and episodes of ‘fantasy’ do enhance our ability to imagine possibilities and subsequently build them into our future behavior. Such rationale also coalesces with neuroscientist Giacomo Rizzolatti’s theory of ‘mirror systems.’ Mirror systems, or otherwise ‘mirror neurons,’ represent a form of imitation learning, whereby through direct observation of an action, process, sport, or cultural event, some correlating skill or artistry can be sensed, learnt and exercised by the observer.
In short, neuroscience is progressively showing that we can become, to some extent, what we see and what we think. We can actively flourish or become creatively ‘charged’ by attending the ballet, losing (and finding) ourselves in a film or piece of music, or watching the Winter Olympics, for example. Accordingly, as a way to advance embodied simulation, mirror systems show that the cognitive structures involved in our own bodily sensations contribute to the conceptualisation of what we observe (or think we observe) in the world around us. This also ties in with neurophysiologist Gerald Edelman’s assertion that “every act of perception is to some degree an act of creation.”
Oddity Programming might help prompt and instruct humans, computers and systems to accommodate more unaccustomed or obscure inputs and scenarios, even if this may mean we never quite receive the answer we thought we might. Of course, this can be very useful, and is how new knowledge is frequently discovered.
So, like dreaming, an acknowledgement of ‘disorder’ as something meaningful is leading some computer scientists to develop what is called ‘overfitting’ – programmes that operate with ambiguous, unstable, and even chaotic data. Where, the human mind has always demonstrated great capacity to ‘overfit,’ we need to address an imperative and responsibility to invest more in disruptive creative processing, not less.
In this regard too, the human mind can establish clear (or unclear) distinctions from machine learning, AI, and neural networks. Current AI tends to learn from the processing of recognised or familiar data, and therefore its limitation can be that it works primarily with discernible information.
So again, we may be reminded that outlets, platforms, laboratories and teams of ambitious conjecturing, dreaming, and oddity programming remain crucial to creativity, innovation, and the vital nourishment of people, places, and instruments of new learning.
So, team up, dream on and dream bigger.
The Presence Of Fashion.
Photo by Simon Thorogood, courtesy of the National Gallery.
“Absence, the highest form of presence.”
― James Joyce
Can fashion develop as something more abstracted and something more ‘absent?’ As a philosophically speculative medium, can clothing become progressively determined by a process of perception rather than through physical fabrication?
Being There.
It may be argued that notions of presence and absence are largely determined by what we perceive to be ‘there’ or ‘not there,’ and the context and situation in which we ‘find’ things.
For some, only the physical ‘thing’ itself can define presence. For others, as argued by Plato (Phaedrus), it can be through representations of the real, such as images or text, which establish mediated or collectively agreed legitimacy. For others still, as proposed by Jacques Derrida (De la Grammatologie), there is no automatic or central state of being. Rather, it is only through mediated and mutually agreed imperatives and practices, such as language, that can provide legitimate forms of presence for us, simply because significance and content cannot possibly exist outside intermediary meaning.
In Being and Time, German philosopher Martin Heidegger asserted that all conceptions of the human being as a subject, self, person, individual, or consciousness, are all effectively captives of conventions of thinking whose inferences have simply not been thought through radically enough.
One of Heidegger’s central points is that “being there” can only be defined by time, so that something can come into existence within a particular time frame. In such a time span, we are able to draw upon and engage with a past (both personal and cultural), and by the open possibilities ahead of us. For humans to understand themselves better, then, they need to project themselves to their own death or state of physical absence – what Heidegger called “being-towards-death.”
In order to establish convenient frameworks for this to happen, we conceive for ourselves the notion of Gods, and where we reside within set religions. We can also create other philosophical and conceptual ‘arenas,’ in which we can both find ourselves and lose ourselves in – the arts, for example.
Findingness.
An interpretation of this idea is that we can only determine our true being through abstracted conditions, places, or conduits. What Heidegger believed principally defines and drives the human condition is our engagement with deep and ambiguous questions, states of “findingness,“ and why is there something rather than nothing?
So, if perceptions of what may be real or not and what is present or not might become a little more convoluted here, then this gives us licence to always re-evaluate what constitutes a condition of fashion, an item of clothing, artefact, space or environment, how it exists, and how we choose to find it.
There and Not There.
To develop a point, let us consider how we engage with art and culture. As an example, let’s take Hans Holbein the Younger’s portrait of Christina of Denmark of 1538, which resides in Room 12 of London’s National Gallery. For many, an initial engagement with the clothing or colour in this particular portrait, or any other mediated ‘masterpiece,’ may not be by visiting the actual painting in person. More routinely, many of us experience seminal artworks through secondary sources, such as a reproduction in a book, or by watching a TV documentary.
This tells us that culture need not just rely on physical proximity or presence, but that both a reproduced and/or abstracted artefact can provide a justified ‘art experience’ for a viewer, receiver, or audience. A photograph will, of course, be different to the ‘real’ painting, but the reproduction, the book, the catalogue, the lecture, etc., will likely reach a far wider audience than those who have seen the actual painting in situ.
Philosopher Walter Benjamin argued that the replica or copy does, in fact, confer authority and context because it simply allows a work to exist where it may not otherwise. It can function, therefore, as primary information, meaning that the postcard or the magazine article can be the work. And, when we walk away from the ‘real’ artwork, we may cease direct contact with it, but it can retain existence and potency in the mind for a long time to come.
Towards a Presence of Fashion.
“…might evolving forms of ‘cognizant clothes’ help us to be ‘more ourselves,’ or ‘less ourselves,’ or will they urge us to be ‘other ourselves?”
We might appreciate, then, that knowledge, presence, value and capital can be accrued through processes of abstraction. We might also recognise that resultant creative, intellectual or fiscal potency derived from such abstracted exchanges with clothing or dress ‘not actually there’ can lead to, and sustain, compelling forms of ‘notional fashion.’
So, in the years to come, how might we learn to ‘visit’ fashion differently, and at different time points, and what will any ‘existence’ of fashion feel like for us?
Where a garment cannot currently question itself, issue commands or advice, overtly express doubt, excitement, anger or love, this may not always be the case. So, what might clothes of a future question of their wearers? As garments themselves become progressively connected, aware and astute, we may see types of ‘linked in-vestment’ pieces for our wardrobes, where these cede physical presence for philosophical presence.
Where Heidegger contends that the human being must be expressed through indifferent characters, in turn, might evolving forms of ‘cognizant clothes’ help us to be ‘more ourselves,’ or ‘less ourselves,’ or will they urge us to be ‘other ourselves?’
Connected Clothing.
Photo by Katarzyna Grabowska
How might active reconnections with our earlier lives and clothes serve to enhance our cognitive health and further understandings of ‘eudaemonic fashion?’
Scientific studies of the human mind continue to reveal how our own histories, memories and thoughts can actively shape our future selves.
Psychologist Ellen Langer from Harvard University, conducted a very interesting social experiment in 1979 involving a participant group between the ages of 70 and 80. In a monastery, Ellen replicated a historically accurate living environment from precisely 1959, including authentic décor, clothing, books, magazines, food, television and music. Here, the group was requested to live and act as if it really was 1959.
As part of the exercise, participants were to keep a journal of their time, as well as take part in regular group discussions with researchers, including their own recollections of the 1950’s. After the project, 66% of the participants recorded significantly enhanced improvement to their cognitive condition, and overall state of wellbeing.
Interestingly, they also reported a renewed connection with their period clothing, leading them to not only take greater care of their appearance but also taking greater care of the clothing itself.
What if a developing field of fashion research could provide dedicated eudaemonic dressing-up environments, spaces, or holidays even? Here, we could conduct similar historical re-enactments of our previous lives (or those of others) in order to cultivate psychological enhancement?
In part, this attitude is reflected and recognized by those who routinely engage, wear or collect vintage clothing. Pre-owned garments and accessories can be perceived as being culturally charged with narratives that inform and nourish devotees and audiences.
So, if our minds and wardrobes are variable and malleable, and benefit from activity and conditioning, can we develop dressing up exercises, games, and scenarios, in much the same way that we stage and experience sports events - the Olympics, for example?
Opinion Piece.
Fashion has long provided a medium for us to create fictional versions of ‘me,’ as a person, identity, entity or place imagined, assumed, or temporary, but not always ‘real’ or ‘there.’
Clothes can provide a mask or an interpretation of ourselves, but one that arguably exists, resides and is ‘worn’ in the minds of others. How we might think we are dressed may not always correspond with how others think we are dressed, or what they think we are seeking to project.
This is where fashion is interesting as it can be argued that we very often trade in and adorn ourselves in psychological fabrication above and beyond physical fabrication.
So, how others see us, rather than how we view ourselves, might become a progressively developed avenue of research. This, in part, is reflected in the world of editorial, film, music and personal wardrobe stylists and consultants, or those who use clothes to co-ordinate aspects, usually aesthetic, of what they consider best projects a client’s desired image.
But, in scenarios where we believe we are playing a part in our own film, we might also pause to consider how we behave as a character or actor in someone else’s play, performance, or narrative. To some extent, this is what we already do in certain situations, such as job interviews, for example, where we frequently look to assume or project an impression that we might believe a prospective employer wants to find in us.
Social psychologist Erving Goffman, considered the author of ‘impression management,’ developed an idea of ‘dramaturgy,’ or how in life we often assume a role as an actor on stage, and through which we develop a ‘screenplay’ that establishes how we might be perceived by others.
But as in any role, it is often commentators, reviewers, or critics that report on and determine the quality of a performance, and where this performance may be argued to be instrumental to the very success, or indeed failing, of a production. Therefore, honing our acting and dressing up skills as someone or something ‘else’ may feasibly make us better, or certainly different, than we actually are in certain regards. This can prove to be a significant way for us to practice co-consciousness.
Seeing ourselves and dressing ourselves according to external perceptions of ourselves, whether formed by people we know, or strangers, or else conducted through technology, how AI will progressively begin to ‘see’ us, may prove an intriguing line of questioning for fashion.
If so, how might this practice be developed and taught within fashion design schools and colleges, and how could it be advanced as something I playfully term ‘Thaute Couture’ - a neologism formed from the words, ‘thought’ and ‘haute’ (“thaute” pronounced as “thought”)?
A Sacred Place.
As introduced before, the idea of the ‘fashion augur’ (after ancient Roman and Greek religious figures who ‘listened to the future’) may represent an emergent breed of fashion operative and researcher.
Such creative figures will also require appropriate types of testing space – smaller, flexible, ideational, research ‘imaginariums.’ These places may be characterized by what I call SACRED aims, an acronym formed from the words, Scientific, Artistic, Commercial, Recreational, Eudaemonic & Daedal.
SACRED environments, personnel and organisations, will be exemplified by the best ‘far-ward’ (far off + forward looking) ideals of contemporary art and design education. But, they will also advance far reaching social and environmental responsibility, contest patterns of material consumption, and enhance collective states of wellbeing for fashion.
And, as a template for more conjectural and entrepreneurial creative ‘co-ops,’ these spaces might strategically converge on abstract notions of fashion not purposefully conducted elsewhere. With talent and technology becoming ever more the drivers of innovation, ‘augurs’ will need the means and resources to creatively fuel more undefined, even ambiguous research areas.
Such a policy may deliver increased productivity and recognition for new or emerging areas of investigation and lead to new responsible ideas, markets and commercial opportunity.
This scenario will also increase prospects of attracting the best emerging minds, not only in developing digital domains but, crucially, in more unfamiliar fields of research.
It is for these reasons, that original, uncommon and oblique forms of creative enquiry must be championed alongside more conventional or agenda-driven research, for its potential visionary influence and advancement of studentship, innovation, culture, enterprise and institutional influence.
Just Think About It.
Where a creative process can involve almost anything we want it to, the accomplishment of an outcome will often reside in the idea and not just in the physical form.
But, even before the idea is formed, we need to exercise awareness and attunement. This can assist in any operation of looking, seeing, and recognising things differently from their actual or intended purpose.
If this reinforces a notion that ingenuity lies principally in the mind, what new philosophical estates can we apply to fashion solely through perception?
The New Normal.
The French philosopher Michel Foucault introduced a concept of ‘heterotopia,’ as a place of ‘other’ and a discursive and transformative space that embodies ideas of both utopia and dystopia. Heterotopia represents a world set within a world that both mirrors and challenges the outside world.
The arts, literature, and music, have long excelled at creating heterotopias, inventing imaginary worlds, and providing spaces and scenarios in which to inhabit and test ideas that both mirror and challenge the outside world. In this regard, a creative process or operation can be regarded as a legitimate form of activism and progenitor of change.
As is increasingly apparent, a metaphorical mirror is now being held up to fashion, urgently inviting the industry to reflect on dubitable business practices and models. Modification and revision will need to be radical in certain regards – issues of environmental stewardship and ethical practices, for instance. But, there may also be judicious need for adjustment in other, seemingly less minacious areas too – what fashion actually is, how it is taught, promoted, communicated, or endorsed, for example.
But, where there is common agreement on widely accepted failings of neo-liberalist business practice, on other matters it can be harder to establish pervasive interpretations of good or bad, especially when they are things that people are not quite sure about. In this regard, we might pause to consider the potential complexities and perils of ‘indifference.’
An absence of acuity towards things we might consider unimportant, that do not directly affect us, progressive detachment from adverse events around the world, or even increased reliance on forms of convenience culture, may indeed prove be precarious.
If we do not constantly exercise ‘alertness,’ developing conditions of indifference can inadvertently lead to an individual or collective surrendering of control, and to incipient forms of autocracy. Furthermore, we might acknowledge that states of affiliation, familiarity and ‘normalization’ can, in some cases, represent the very first steps towards states of totalitarianism.
Accordingly, we must consider how we clearly position ourselves on prosaic and commonplace matters as much as perceived matters of profundity. We must constantly question and challenge the notion of normalisation, and if and how we align with any situation, argument, or agenda.
By behaving so, we may become (co) authors, or (co) editors of new expressions of dissatisfaction and activism that can lead to new forms of consensus and harmony. In turn, this can establish new forms of cumulative insight, cooperation, and agency for us.
But, any new world or existence we wish to invent can only ever be established if we fully accept our individual and collective responsibility in constructing the very particular frameworks required for ‘world-building.’
Within fashion, if we understand that a simultaneous ending of an old order and embarkation of a new ideology is necessary, we must also concede that our denial of the old and our endorsement of the new must be absolute, resolute and clear.
Here, we will need to employ a very emphatic “yes,” or a very emphatic “no,” rather than any ambivalent “maybe.”
Back To The Future.
Where fashion has long held a fascination for the future, it has often conducted a varied dialogue with the ‘tomorrow’ through a prism of the ‘now.’ Here, it is the complex conditions of a perceived present that can lead to idealistic, romanticised, or radical realizations of that ‘yet to come.’
However, forms of creative ingenuity that often prove the most compelling for us, whether in music, art, performance, filmmaking, etc., seem to be somehow aesthetically unfamiliar, or to have arrived from a point far off. Here, we can feel we are experiencing an aspect, circumstance, and commodity of the future, or otherwise something simply not of this time and place.
This can tell us that our considerations of time, understanding, decision-making, creativity, and other concepts of the future, need not be linear or established by a present. This also tells us that we are individually and collectively accountable for determining the affirmative co-ordinates, places, and values that we wish to inhabit.
By establishing or inventing things not yet discovered, we may orchestrate different outcomes, scenarios or itineraries from positions, settings, and processes we otherwise might be led to believe are fixed, or determined by others.
These are qualities that both art and science-fiction literature have traditionally been very good at describing. This should give us license, therefore, to engineer more speculative places for future-scoping, underpinned by more conditions of adventure, risk-taking and naivety, and populated by more uncommon personnel looking to find more unfamiliar territories.
So, let’s get building, and let’s get recruiting!
Abstract Expressionism.
Creative and inclusive networks, communities, and idea spaces may progressively prove to be the most important measure of intelligence for us.
Here, products and outputs can be developed as emotional, philosophical, and conceptual – inventive forms of communication, love, respect, empathy and kindness, for example – rather than materially perceptible, measurable, corporeal, or fiscal.
State Of Mind.
The evolving Metaverse and Internet of Things is set to develop as a comprehensive integration of the ‘us and the everything.’ Within this ‘live technology,’ it is expected that it will quickly learn to know us better than we currently know ourselves?’
As such, it will be interesting to see how much we will choose to give over of ourselves. How much will simply be taken or ‘annexed,’ by whom, and how much of us may be idealistically enhanced or extended through this potentially messy, new portal of augmented existences.
Where our new habitat might facilitate a progressive disengagement with states of materiality, the physical, and corporeal, will more societal emphasis be placed on immaterial ‘outputs’ instead, whether professionally or recreationally orientated?
Correspondingly, might new forms of currency and value be forged through embellished and advanced forms of the non-physical, such as storytelling, language, communication, song, asset-tokenism, ideas, or philosophy, for example? But aligned to this, what new forms of mental surcharge or conceptual taxation may be levied upon us within this immersive condition?
Will we witness the ‘proletarianization’ of the mind, or the ‘paeanism’ of the imagination?
Set In The Third Person.
Having just watched the 1949 British Film Noir, The Third Man, this complex, intriguing, and highly stylish film has still much to tell us about the complexities of the human condition, and how this can be (mis)shaped through want, greed, and deception.
Directed by Carol Reed, written by Graham Greene, and starring Orson Wells, the movie is set in a bleak post-WW2 Vienna, a place of bomb-damaged grandeur and seedy settings of black marketeering. It is dramatically shot in an expressionist black and white style, with ‘Dutch’ slanted framing and scored throughout by Zither music, that is simultaneously cheery and disquieting.
The setting of Vienna as a once magnificent capital city that has seen the end of an old order, and now a place of weary cynicism, hardship, illicit dealings and emergent Cold-War espionage, is profound. The polarisation of sordid poverty and purloined prosperity provides a precarious space in between where behavior and morals are as damaged and compromised as the architecture in the semi-ruined city.
Yet, as a metaphor the city seems to connect us to a contemporary setting in which the ‘sovereignty’ of neo-liberalist capitalism may also be seen to belong to an old, or deteriorating order and existence. In the film, we see Vienna as a framework in which the leading characters all individually struggle within the very symbolism of the film – the high-contrast black and white photography; the dark and light settings; the arresting elevated views from the Ferris wheel, and the underworld of the city sewer system set against the street level. These all play off ambiguous notions of idealism, personal and monetary survival, and a swinging pendulum of human integrity, if not quite as convenient as good versus bad.
These characteristics can also be seen to chime with a current condition of fashion, and the awkwardness it now faces confronting its reflection in its own dressing mirror.
With regard to issues of market forces, commercial enterprise, acquisition, gratuitous consumption and environmental responsibility, the central character of Harry Lime, played by Welles, is felicitous. Lime is considered a responsible and honest entrepreneur, friend and lover, supposedly knocked down by a car whilst crossing the street, and collectively mourned at his funeral. Instead, he is gradually revealed as dishonest, deceitful, exploitative, and certainly responsible for manslaughter, if not quite murder.
Lime may correspondingly represent for us changing perceptions of the fashion business. His character epitomizes and exemplifies the complex paradox evidenced by an industry that has for so long been championed as a positive and prominent component of culture, whilst furtively embodying inequity, turpitude for the environment, and the many exploited peoples within it.
In the end, pursued by those he once loved or admired, Lime meets his end in the sewers, his own domain. The ending, not especially a happy one, is brighter but still fairly ambiguous. It leaves the viewer with the restless perception that none of the main characters get to leave Vienna – this skewed city, as awry as the film’s camera angles.
It’s such an absorbing and layered film, with much to enjoy, and much to think about on many levels.
Changing Rooms.
Within a creative process or experience, for something ‘charged’ to happen, the space in which this takes place will need to be assigned with both authority and uncertainty. It will need to simultaneously accommodate perceptions of continuity and security, and attitudes of unease and revolution.
This dynamic can often be contextual and transitory, depending on a shifting palette of criteria, such as points in time, personnel mixes, intentions, available technologies, funding, and so forth.
How, then, do we develop highly provocative physical and conceptual spaces where ‘unfixed’ energies, opportunities, occasions, and languages coalesce and flourish? And, how can we advance such flexible creative environments that support multiple use, practice and philosophy, and which themselves can be programmed to learn, anticipate and prepare for unknown futures?