The Ideological Antecedents of The British Motor Show

Review: The British Motor Show 2006, The Excel Centre.

In his splendidly titled essay The Ideological Antecedents of the Rolls-Royce Radiator, Erwin Panofsky compared the design of a Rolls- Royce to the English Picturesque tradition. Essentially, the radiator represented the Neo-Classical country house while the curvaceous body work represented the surrounding landscape. I mention this because, for the most part, car design hasn’t been written about by design critics and remains the preserve of people like Jeremy Clarkson. This is odd because for architects especially, car design has long represented a kind of pure technical dream, an engineering-led antidote to architecture’s stylistic vagaries. Le Corbusier famously extolled the merits of the motor car and included his own car in photographs of his houses; the two being yoked together as symbiotic arbiters of the new age.

Now, whilst I may be no Erwin Panofsky, I’d like to think I’m not exactly Jeremy Clarkson either. So, I thought I might start an appraisal of contemporary car design at the British International Motor Show. Housed in the new Excel centre (think massive retail shed meets Heathrow Terminal 5) it’s supposed to be the motor industry’s UK showcase. Initially though, it’s pretty disappointing. There are none of the kind of slightly absurd “cars of the future” one might expect, and it’s all rather humdrum in a new Ford Ka sort of way. No hover cars travelling on air, or solar panelled vehicles running silently for mile after mile on the energy of a light bulb. Nope, it looks at first like a glorified garage forecourt; popular everyday cars forlornly rotating on their plinths, buffed by an army of feather duster wielding attendants.

All the major manufacturers have displays, the designs of which are intended to subtly reinforce their brand values. So Aston Martin, Jaguar and Range Rover all have individual stands despite being part of the same giant Ford conglomerate. And whilst Aston Martin self-consciously deal in a slightly fusty, old school sophistication, the (basically identical) Jaguar goes for a slicker metropolitan chic with a stand resembling a fashionable bar circa 1997. The Ford stand, on the other hand, bludgeons the visitor with a ubiquitous car show aesthetic of multiple screens and crap music.



At the happening SUV end of the spectrum, the cars just seem to get bigger and bigger, regardless of functional reason, aesthetic restraint or ecological responsibility. Hummer, Chrysler and Range Rover compete to have their enormous vehicles drooled over by disturbingly Columbine style teenagers. The Range Rover Sport 4.8 V8 (with Ebony Sports seats, hand- polished, lined oak interior and Zermatt silver finish) for instance, costs £62,797, does 12.4 miles to the gallon and could wipe out an entire school bus in one missed gear change. The styling is a mixture of surgically enhanced utility vehicle and blinged up minibus. Even Bentley have recast their old fashioned gent’s tourer into a prop for an R&B video. One can imagine the salesman in HR Owen trying to flog the new and hugely ostentatious Continental Flying Spur: “Yes, Mr Diddy, the Connolly leather interior would indeed be most comfortable for one’s ‘bitches’”.

There is other stuff to keep the car buff happy too: automotive art (“I’m not a total philistine. Honestly, I like paintings too. Just paintings that have cars in”), personalised number plates, flying jackets, very large exhaust pipes. There are also stands selling badges, stickers and toy cars that are as likely to be bought by middle aged men as young boys – which pretty much describes the demographic attending. There are also a few Posh and Becks-like couples wandering around in expensive leisurewear, hoping perhaps to live out a Hart to Hart fantasy of high speed lane swapping on the M25 in matching Ferraris.

Having said all that, the enthusiasm with which I head for the giant eight lane Scalextric set is quite disturbing. As is the humourless way I set about demolishing the opposition in my race, the average age of whom is approximately eight. Yeah, car enthusiasm tends to encourage a collapsing of childhood and middle age. It’s the preserve of people for whom the car represents some kind of simplistic vision of freedom, presumably from the constraints of family. And perhaps this is why, as a form of escapism it also escapes serious analysis. People who enthuse about cars tend to enthuse about the same things: speed, cc’s chrome wheel trims. Either deeply dull or childishly enthusiastic, car writing is stuck between detailing luggage capacity or finding new ways to say: “Gosh, this is really fast!”. Lacking any serious critical discussion, car design hasn’t ever developed a language to describe itself or what it does.

Like Le Corbusier before her, Zaha Hadid has had a go at being a car designer and her eponymously titled Z.Car is featured at the Motor Show. Predictably enough, it’s a cheesily retro-futurist vehicle, a magic marker drawing from the 1970s brought to life. In Panofskian terms, it’s ideological antecedents are the space race imagery of the 1960’s mixed with the smooth surfaces of contemporary computer rendering. In Jeremy Clarkson’s world it’s merely a bit slow and slightly weird looking.

The British International Motor Show was at Excel, London, 20-30 July
www.britishmotorshow.co.uk

The Ideal Stress Free Sustainable Spotless 0 % Balance Transferred Life

Review: The Ideal Home Show 2006, Earls Court.

Since 1908 the Ideal Home show has charted mainstream British taste in houses and interiors. Not much has changed stylistically it seems, but the show has never really embraced architectural notions of progress, either formal or technological. If technology is celebrated here it is in the ability to minutely adjust your armchair or comes hidden in the pre-fabricated panels behind t+g cladding. Here, architecture – to the horror of architects – is no longer about abstract space or challenging geometry but psychological well-being and domestic comfort.

This year’s theme is sustainability and is represented by an enormous fake waterfall. Somewhere nearby lurk Channel 5’s Justin Ryan and Colin McAllister and their spectacular tree house in its “authentic rainforest setting”. Justin and Colin loom large over the show with their brand of metropolitan snobbism and shameless stylistic globe-trotting. Their Asian Influences bedroom (“Hey, even the paint used to decorate the walls is from the Breathe Easy collection by Crown”) typifies the show’s notion of sustainability as mainly to do with celebrating the earthy hues of exotic locales. So, their bedroom also uses “…fabrics woven in the far east by fairly paid workers” as if using fabrics woven in Brentwood by fairly paid workers would be utterly unsustainable.

Away from this billowy rhetoric the exciting action seems to be upstairs at the cheapo end where a furiously competitive market exists for highly toxic cleaning products and futuristic steam irons. Snake oil sellers of a never-to-be-achieved spotless domesticity demonstrate Amazing Pasta Storage Jars, weird robotic hoovers and Magic Saucepans. There’s also some sub Jack Vetriano artworks and vast armies of people selling you Spanish timeshares, botox injections, 0% balance transfers and eye massage glasses. Overall, upstairs as well as down, there is an astonishing number of products related to stress relief and relaxation. Much of the show is taken up by vast and slightly scary looking massage chairs, complete with digital consoles and heat sensors to (supposedly) locate your personal areas of pain and discomfort. Hundreds of jacuzzi’s lined like mother of pearl oysters and festooned with action packed nozzles and rubber water jets, take up much of the other half. What else is there? Well, some fairly anodyne furniture, the occasional bronze leopard or chrome nude, some celebrity chefs and a few bits of interesting new design. It’s not unlike 100% Design, 98% design maybe, but where the innovation is in cleaning products.

Ultimately, the Ideal Home show is about the home as a sanctuary from modern life: a repository for any number of labour saving devices and home spas and ergonomic dining chairs. As Adolf Loos wrote at the beginning of the 20th century, the modern house is a haven from the existentially alienating urban environment. Hence all the massage chairs and fish tanks. Outside, the world is creased, stained and stressful. Inside, all is steam pressed, deep down clean and profoundly relaxing. In its way it’s not that far either from Archigram’s 1960’s dream of the electronic cottage or the well serviced capsule home. It doesn’t look like that for sure – there are no roundy corners or space race styling – but the clapboard covered ideal homes on show are mass-produced, super insulated, custom fitted environments. Relax in your spotless Dyson hoovered Asian Influences front room, set the massage seat to 30 minute Shiatsu, sip some decaffeinated fair trade coffee from your super sized Crazy Frog mug and watch Desperate Housewives on the Plasma screen: the Ideal Life.

I Never Thought The Reviews I Read Were True Until...

Review: The Playboy Archives, Proud Gallery, Camden.

I’m starting to regret this now. I’m sitting in the pub explaining to a friend why I am reviewing the Playboy archives and it’s all sounding a little…..sleazy. “It’s about design” I say none too convincingly. I give up asking anyone if they want to come see the show with me and end up going alone, furtively shuffling ‘round the exhibition with a notebook like a teenager with a Pamela Anderson obsession. Having said that, once inside, the Playboy Archives is considerably less revealing than you might imagine. It consists of a collection of covers from 1953 onwards, some stand-alone photographs of famous Playmates of the Month (including, bizarrely, Katarina Witt) and some framed interviews with famous men. There are also various pictures of founder Hugh Hefner in the exhibition, usually shown wandering the near mythic Playboy mansion wearing silk pyjamas.

Playboy is generally regarded as upmarket soft pornography. In fact it is read by the sort of people who might baulk at the term pornography preferring euphemisms such as ‘gentlemen’s entertainment’ or, worse, ‘erotica’. In this, it aspires both to be something other than a humble porn mag, and to elevate the porn element to a civilised hobby on a par with pipe smoking and vintage motor-cars. For a start it has writing in it, and not just of the “I never thought the stories in your magazine were true until…” variety. It carries interviews with famous men (not women) and fiction from serious writers. It also though, unarguably, has lots of pictures of naked women in it. These pictures are either, depending on your constitution, rather tame or more explicit than you imagined. It’s not Razzle but it’s not The Lady either.

Time has given the 1950’s and ‘60’s Playmates an inevitable period charm – today they seem as de-sexualised as a bit of What the Butler Saw Edwardian saucy-ness. The period hairdos, moustaches (on the men, mostly) and clothes draw attention away from what was originally the point. In fact, hair is a key component in porn: at least of the pubic variety. In the 50’s and 60’s it was generally not seen at all. By the ‘70’s it is there in all its glory. In fact, given today’s tastes for depilation, it is perversely the hair that tends to shock most. The ‘70’s were also an excellent period for unusual props. Horses were a favourite, with naked women shown leading them through lens flare improved countryside like a porno Sandy Denny. By the 80’s, the bodies had become harder and, of course, more hairless. They also started to be designed for the job, leading to the purpose built caricatures of Pamela Anderson, Carmen Elektra and Jordan. The ‘80’s also saw the rise of various famous photographers including Mike Figgis and Helmut Newton, both shown in this exhibition. Here, porn brushes up against art, but in a fundamentally rather naff way. As Susan Sontag has pointed out, if pornography has claims to art, then it is more through its potential for transgression than through arty composition or ‘classy’ imagery.

Alongside the excesses of today’s so-called Gonzo porn, Playboy seems relatively harmless: very much the product of a boy’s imagination that thinks new gadgets, well tailored suits, sexist jokes and, of course, lots of naked ladies, are the accoutrements of sophistication. All, of course, unthreatened by anything as troubling as sexual politics, female desire or un-airbrushed flesh. The spin-off from this veneer of sophistication was that there was a certain subtlety and inventiveness that went into the presentation. But, just as the bodies have become more designed the magazine has become less so. Whilst the covers of the ‘60’s and ‘70’s were often graphically striking in their own right, the latest ones merely list the magazine’s contents around yet another famous face. And, as the bodies themselves have become more ruthlessly exposed to the light, they have had to work that much harder to retain our attention: shaved, taped, pumped up and, finally, photo-shopped into a kind of freaky perfection,

See, it was about design. So, I return to the pub, suitably unembarrassed, but not before I have picked up some new silk pyjamas on the way.