What I Did This Autumn

Apparent on-line inactivity should not be taken for slothfulness. I have been busy. Honestly. I can be found, for example, reviewing Paul Barker's book The Freedoms of Suburbia in the current issue of Architecture Today. This is a book that has been reviewed pretty extensively in both the architectural and mainstream press so my piece is hardly new but it manages to be - unexpectedly - more critical than some others.

Although I'm generally pretty positive about the joys of suburbia, I was concerned by both a knee-jerk anti-modernism in Barker's book (a bit rich coming from someone complaining about aesthetic prejudice) and a strain of free-market libertarianism which dismisses any form of social policy or politically informed housing policy. "Politically informed housing policy" is a phrase likely to send a chill into Paul Barker's heart I imagine. Nonetheless I don't regard suburbia as some kind of natural phenomena - the unperverted manifestation of people's desires - as many of its apologists do. It is however pretty good at reconciling a number of competing desires that people seem to have. Its loose, relatively unplanned form also allows elements of the unexpected to occur which is one reason why architects, with their fetish for form and control freakishness, don't like it.

Anyway, it's all there in the review which is short but pithy! It's not to be found online unfortunately (pointless link here) so you will either have to buy a copy or, alternatively, study for seven years to become a registered architect and get a free subscription. Either way, the issue is well worth buying for the extended essay on the reconstruction of Berlin by Doug Clelland.

Also this month I'm in Icon reviewing James Wines' recent lecture at the Barbican and wearing a pair of silly sunglasses. That's me not James Wines. He's the guy with the big beard. This is something of a split jury review too as Wines is a bit of a hero of mine, albeit one whose recent work lacks the punch of his early stuff.

Finally, on Thursday I'm giving a lecture at the University of Portsmouth School of Architecture. If you live there and you read this (what are the chances?) come along.

(Illustration: George Shaw: What I Did This Summer. Via)

"This Means Something!"

"I figured it out, that's all. Will you just listen?... Have you ever looked at something and it's crazy, and then you looked at it in another way and it's not crazy at all?... Don't be scared. Just don't be scared. I feel really good. Everything's gonna be all right. I haven't felt this good in years."

I watched Close Encounters of the Third Kind again the other day. It's a fabulous film in many ways, imbued with an almost lyrical technological optimism. Despite coming from a golden age of cinematic science-fiction, it's completely different in tone to anything else from the period. While Star Wars, for example, can be read as an allegory for the Cold War and America's struggle against another Evil Empire, Close Encounters is a plea for tolerance and understanding. Even the military appear relatively benign in it.

It can also be seen as having another, more unlikely, sub-text; one about issues of representation and communication. The film's central character is Roy Neary (played by Richard Dreyfus). Following a close encounter with an alien spaceship Roy becomes obsessed with visions of a strange, mountainous formation. He notices this shape everywhere: in the folds of his pillows, in the blob of aftershave in his hand and in a mound of mashed potatoes on his plate.



He starts to create maquettes of it in clay which become ever larger and more elaborate. Eventually, having alienated his entire family to the point where they move out, he creates an enormous model that fills his entire house. To make this model he ransacks the garden for materials, chucking them through a broken window into the living room to the horrified bemusement of his neighbours.

The resulting model is an utterly fabulous object, a grotesque assemblage of mud, vegetation, rubble, furniture and bits of string. It is both mimetically accurate (as we and Roy will later find out) and highly expressionistic, as if created by a bizarre hybrid of Robert Smithson, Jessica Stockholder and an acid-crazed model railway enthusiast.

Just as Roy is nearing the completion of this extraordinary object he realises what it means. The TV that he has blaring in the corner of the otherwise devastated living room has a news report about a bizarre shaped rocky outcrop in Wyoming. Roy looks at the footage of Devil's Tower and then back at his creation. He sits down in shock.



In some senses Roy is like a typically Hollywood-ian depiction of the artist: a half-crazed, anti-social lunatic in search of some intangible truth. Except he isn't an artist. Nor is he mad, just a little intense. And the film also wants us to take him seriously. His sculpture, as he repeatedly explains whist making it, really does mean something.



The film is obsessed with issues of representation and non-verbal communication. The famous five-note score that the scientists use to communicate with the aliens, for example, effectively replaces speech. The chief scientist is a Frenchman (played by film director François Truffaut) who makes no more than one or two gnomic utterances and is accompanied throughout the film by an ineffectual translator. The fact that none of the Americans can understand him seems to imbue him with some special understanding of what is going on.

Roy can't communicate his obsession through conventional language and is forced into non-verbal communication. He has to make what he is thinking in order to express it. And he's not alone in his obsession. Another character - Gillian Guiler - is also obsessed with Devil's Tower. She draws it over and over again. In a brilliant scene the two of them converge on Devil's Tower aware that it's the location for the alien spaceship's landing. Trying to work out how to scale the mountain Roy reveals that his knowledge of its topography is vastly superior to Gillian's. "You should try sculpture next time", he deadpans.

In making a plea for tolerance the film also seems to implicitly reject language, as if our primary means of communication were somehow ultimately a handicap to understanding. Language seems to dissolve during the film, becoming ever more useless until it dissipates into the abstract lights and sounds used by the scientists to communicate to the aliens. It is, in many ways, an anti-logocentric film, a celebration of the non-verbal and the techno-haptic.

Lines On The Imminent Demise of The Isle of Wight Waxwork Museum

(Photo: George Bernard Shaw on his Starley tricycle)

An outburst on Twitter about crap museums has elicited the sad news that the Isle of Wight waxworks (officially called Brading: The Experience) is about to close. VentnorBlog has some lovely photos of the various extremely weird exhibits inside, a few of which are included here. I went to the museum mid-way through a three day camping holiday on the island during which it rained solidly. The bizarreness of the exhibits (Winston Churchill's Austin A40, a collection of Sinclair C5's) together with a trip to the Godshill Model Village just about alleviated the gloom.

I like waxworks and local museums. There's usually an inexplicable quality to the choices of exhibit. This arises, I imagine, from a combination of economics (they don't have any money), desperation (anything will do) and randomness (they get bequeathed some very odd things). At Rottingdean in Sussex, for example, the local museum consists of a waxwork of Rudyard Kipling, a Hornby train set and a collection of farming implements*. Waxworks tend to be even more bizarre, partly because the celebrities featured quickly fade into obscurity. The Madame Tussaud's wax museum in Blackpool features Jaws from Moonraker as the doorman to a casino in which Eric Cantona and Gianfranco Zola are playing a game of roulette with, I think, Paula Abdul. I'm fairly sure I didn't dream this.


(Photo: Queen Victoria, sans tapping foot)

At Brading The Experience there's a lot of Royal Family related material and an emphasis on slightly gruesome torture methods (is there any other kind?) and mummified animals. Sometimes all three are combined. The waxwork of Queen Victoria incorporates a much trumpeted "animatronic" element which turned out to be an inexplicably tapping foot. Brading was an expensive experience too as I remember, which may account for its imminent demise. I'm not sure if the wonderful Nothing To See Here has been to Brading, but soon there won't be. Anything to see there, that is.


(Photo: The "famous" winged cat)

* The influence of this collection may account for Rottingdean residents British Sea Power's musical output to date.

Thriller

Ok, so I'm happy to admit to being really quite inordinately thrilled about this. The Resistible Demise of Michael Jackson (Zero Books) is available for pre-order at Amazon. I have a contribution - about correlations between the design of Neverland and the transformation of Michael Jackson himself- in this collection of essays about MJ. Much more excitingly it includes contributions by Ian Penman, Barney Hoskins and Chris Roberts, as well as a host of excellent writers from the blogosphere including Dominic Fox, Evan Calder-Williams, Robin Carmody and Sam Davies. You could even buy a copy.

Many thanks to the editor Mark Fischer and to Owen (also contributing) for including me in such a fine array.

Ok, gush over. Back to business. (Straightens tie. Goes back to reading RIBA Standard Terms of Appointment).