Modernism: A Potted History

In Memoriam: Momoluku Ando (March 5th 1910 - January 5th 2007)

Momoluku Ando - who died at the beginning of January this year - bequeathed the world one of its most incredible products: the Pot Noodle. Could there be a better icon of mass-produced, instant, transportable, lightweight, efficient, international modernity than the Pot Noodle? Forget the Futurist’s Cook Book, this is food as Modernists dreamt the world could be.

Despite its staggering success the Pot Noodle occupies a problematic place in our food culture. In fact, for most people, it is doubtful whether they would actually class it as a food at all. Pot Noodle is most definitely a PRODUCT and, these days food's cultural value lies in its claims to naturalness. Current attitudes to food mirror our mixed up attitude to modernity in general. Food consumption is currently subject to more sentimentalism, pseudo-regionalism and sheer perversity than even architecture. It is no coincidence that Prince Charles’ twin areas of industry over the last twenty years have been in these two fields. His combination of a misty eyed veneration of olde England, deep political conservatism, sentimental love of the land and anti-scientific belief systems have given us both Poundbury and Duchy Originals: his recently built village and organic food range respectively.

If Duchy Originals hail from the same source as Poundbury then where do Pot Noodles come from? Tokyo? Milton Keynes? Well, Wales actually but like Milton Keynes they are derided and denigrated by all right thinking people, symbolic of a wasteful, over packaged, over sanitised, lazy and nutritionally under-nourished culture, removed from food production, lost to the land, indifferent to the changing seasons. They are the ultimate enemy of the Slow Food movement, the Room 101 of TV chefs. Duchy Originals are self-consciously conservative, evoking images of localised cottage farming industry. Organic, authentic and original. The associations with monarchy may rankle but the Duchy bacon and biscuits on our supermarket shelves are a favourite of urban foodies. And this is another paradox of our complex culture. Recently, our retail landscape has inverted itself. Gentrified parts of East London are now full of specialist cheese emporiums, retro sweet shops and down to earth farmers markets. Urbanites, decked in Japanese denim and plugged into Californian software, amble about picking the greenfly off Bramlies and the mud off Maris Pipers. Farmer’s stalls fill up vacant plots of inner London like a cross between Archigram’s Instant City and the Archers. It’s like….well, actually it’s so complicated, so perversely tortuous in its lack of logic that it’s hard to say what it's like. Who would have thought the city would end up looking like this? Certainly not the Futurists and, probably, not the inventor of Pot Noodles either. Meanwhile, out in the sticks, everyone is off to Tesco.

In a land of Nigel and Nigella, modern convenience food appears doomed. Except it isn’t. Pot Noodle's manufacturer's Unilever sell 4 Pot Noodles every second. Their slick and funny marketing campaign plays relentlessly on the negative connotations of Pot Noodles, constantly referring to its unnaturalness and slobby lack of sophistication. They recently brought out a super hot curry version called Bombay Bad Boy and a more upmarket one called Posh Noodle. And just look at that Bombay Bad Boy packing. It’s black with flames on it. When did anyone try and sell food in packaging that looked like a hot rod? No tasteful use of tartan, no retro packaging, no “I’m home made, I must be good for you” schtick. Pot Noodle flaunts its in-authenticity, it's status as a product, something made in a factory and boxed in its millions. It's latest advertising campaign pokes yet more fun at our longing for natural products by suggesting that the noodles are mined in Wales.

A vegetarian friend of mine at University existed for some time solely on Chicken Pot Noodles. He did this because Chicken Pot Noodles were: A, amazingly cheap and; B, contained absolutely no chicken. Momoluku Ando’s product got my friend through some difficult times. Now, he probably has nothing to with it and gets his vegetables delivered by Able & Cole. This, though, is our contemporary version of modernity. This is where we went in the century of Modernism that Ando lived through. A society complex enough to embrace the giddying effects of digital technology and to also want its vegetables seasonal and with the mud still on. And, to eat 175 million Pot Noodles a year on the sly.

Sleeve Notes To An Imaginary Album

Note: I wrote this some time ago, but forgot about it. It's a review of St. Etienne's screening of their film Finisterre at the Barbican back in 2004. Tacked on the end is a short interview with Bob Stanley from St. Etienne, who was a very nice man.


“Took a tube to Camden Town,
Walked down Parkway, and settled down
In the shade of a willow tree,
Summer hovering over me.”

St. Etienne, London Belongs To Me

Film 1:

A Tweed suited gentleman prods his walking stick into the crumbling plasterwork of a dilapidated old music hall. On closer inspection the gentleman turns out to be James Mason. He proceeds to wander around a drab and surprisingly distant late 1960's London, uncovering bits of soon to be lost Victoriana, decaying slums and shocking dietary habits; the flip-side to the Swinging ‘60’s of popular mythology.

Film 2:

A plummy voiced chap incongruously recounts the joys of all-night clubbing and the pleasures of finding obscure white labels in back street record shops. A series of disembodied voices talk over an image-track of poignantly framed London scenery. Over it all, floats the music of St. Etienne - 60's girl-group harmonies, 80's synths, 90's house, out-of-time folk.

These two films were recently shown together at the Barbican. The first - Geoffrey Fletcher’s The London Nobody Knows – depicted a disappearing1960’s London of slums and salvation army hostels and has itself, over the years, become a historical curiosity. The second - Finisterre - is a kind of extended album-long video by the pop band St. Etienne with directors Paul Kelly and Keiran Evans. If The London Nobody Knows is an archaeological fragment in itself, then Finisterre aims for a similar kind of archaeology of the present. It poignantly captures contemporary London Life as it is being lived, and is, like The London Nobody Knows, conscious of it’s desire to record things on the verge of obsolescence. A bit like a hip English Heritage. The Thameslink train, for instance, that crawls into a South London station at the beginning of the film and crawls out again at the end already seems an anachronism although I travelled on one only yesterday.

Finisterre’s journey - Victoria Station, Old Street, Primrose Hill, Soho - describes a day in the life. It shows London as a backdrop, constantly transformed and re-made by experience This, In a way, is what pop music does; celebrates escape from the ordinary and lends poignancy to the everyday. St. Etienne's music in particular can perhaps best be described as a mixture of the glamorous and the commonplace. Or, put another way, it moves between the generic and the intensely personal. Their songs take music that we have almost forgotten about – old bits of house music, English folk – and re-invest them with value. the lyrics also re-invent familiar places with intense personal narratives and invest ordinary areas with a kind of poignancy that Archway or Camden rarely attain.

Like the protagonists in the song London Belongs To Me finding something beautiful about an afternoon in Camden Town, this flitting between the apparent drabness of urban existence and its occasional epiphanies might have something to say about how we currently view urban space. It might also suggest ways we might conceive it counter to both the nihilistic doom-mongers and the sentimental piazza-lovers that dominate urban thinking today. Both lament a perceived loss of a sense of civic-ness and identity in the face of corporate, global space. Marc Auge's book Non-Place and Rem Koolhaas’s notion of ‘Junk-Space’ offer a similar analysis of our contemporary experiences as increasingly that of a homogenised flattened-out culture. This dystopian view might be usefully challenged though by pop music's belief that we continuously re-make the world around us. Although, it's true, our bodies can only inhabit one space at any time, our heads might be in any number of places. In this sense nowhere is really non-space because we inhabit a number of spaces simultaneously: social, cultural, economic, political. To put it another way, no space is inhabited neutrally and no space is the same for two people. It's different to be in DKNY rich than without money, to be in Trafalgar Square holding a banner or on an open-top bus. Equally, to be in love and on that bus is to be somewhere else again.

What both these films suggest is that urbanism is as much about how we look at it as it is about plans and strategic frameworks. Not only that but it is in how we 'read' the city and in the way that we identify with it, that we now regenerate whole areas. The transformation of London's East End is, for better or worse, more an act of will, a triumph of desire and demographics, than anything physical or the product of any strategic planning. In fact, not a whole lot has changed there, just the way we look at it.

In The London Nobody Knows, James Mason describes a London literally disappearing below new plans, suggesting that these lives might simply end, and be replaced by more perfect ones. The brave new tower blocks that spring up at the start of the film have been torn down, blown up, sold for a pound, bought again for a million, re-clad and listed by English Heritage since then. By re-investigating this ‘60's oddity - as out of its time as The Kink's Village Green Preservation Society – St. Etienne attempt to show that the city is both more resistant to change than we think but, also, always ready to be re-made by us everyday.



A conversation with Bob Stanley of St. Etienne.


When did you decide to make a film and why?

The idea came about mid-way into recording the album Finisterre. We’ve always been fascinated by London since moving here in the late ‘80’s. Making the film seemed like a logical extension of that.

In your film you cover similar places to the Geoffrey Fletcher one. Is your film a conscious mirroring of the earlier one?

No. It was an influence but we filmed the places that we know ourselves. We were interested though in the way Geoffrey Fletcher uncovers these weird forgotten bits of London. It’s almost as though he records them just because they’re disappearing, not because they’re even that important.

It’s unusual for pop music to celebrate old things isn’t it? It’s normally associated with being radical and rebellious. In rock mythology, caring about eccentric old tea rooms isn’t very cool.

We’ve never been interested in that classic rock lineage. I mean, even if Exile on Main Street was my favourite album I wouldn’t want to talk about it. What can you say that’s new about it?

Is it a conscious part of your music, this idea of recording or evoking places that aren’t that glamorous like Kentish Town or Archway?

Yeah, although growing up in Surrey, London place names were glamorous for me. I’ve always been fascinated by London. And architecture. I studied town planning but gave it up to be a rock journalist.

Good decision! You said you are fascinated by New Towns, which is the flip-side of rotten old London. Why is that?

It’s the idea of a blank canvas, the thought that you could create a perfect community. The job I wanted most when I was 8 was to be the person who thought of all the road names.

Still Life

Review: Patrick Caulfied, Tate Liverpool.

I’m looking at the interior of a 1970’s style faux-rustic bistro. It is almost completely deserted. A single figure, a bored waiter, leans dejectedly on a piece of furniture, contemplating the abyss of the afternoon. The entire space - with the exception of a kitsch Alpine scene hanging on the wall and some oddly luminous goldfish – is blue. A flat, featureless, slightly depressing shade of blue.

The desperate languor of this, or indeed any, empty restaurant is perfectly observed. So too is every object within it: the bulbous handle of the fondue pan, the generous swirl of the waiter’s sideburns, the curving chrome grid of the modernist chairs. It is somehow humorous too, as perfectly descriptive of a certain mood of dull ennui as those shots of a photocopier endlessly churning out paper that used to punctuate The Office. This is After Lunch, perhaps Patrick Caulfield’s best known painting.

Patrick Caulfield, who died last year, was one of Britain’s most celebrated painters. His work provides a link back to the post-war period when British artists began responding to the emerging consumer landscape around them. His paintings are, broadly speaking, Pop Art, with a certain, mostly superficial, resemblance to Roy Lichtenstein’s comic book style. They are characterised by the use of a kind of pseudo technical mannerism – the thick black outline – to depict interiors and objects with a mixture of both exactitude and lyricism. They have something of the look of an architect’s drawing or a technical diagram mixed with the colour sensibility of Tex Avery.

Caulfield’s work describes the everyday: pubs, Indian restaurants, offices, wallpaper, neon signs, beer glasses, clocks on the wall, cinema foyers: places and objects that are experienced normally in a ‘blur of habit’ and go unnoticed. Images like Morning, Noon, Evening and Night are so spare they could be utterly banal - like an Ikea assembly diagram or the dummest of architectural perspectives. But it’s an Ikea assembly diagram bathed in melancholic light or an architect’s drawing that has been subtly caricatured.

More recent pictures are less literal in their depiction of architectural space. A painting like Interior With A Picture for instance, is no longer based on a single, stable, perspective view. Various techniques - cubist and collage-ist – break up and fragment the traditional domestic interior. A painting on a wall (rendered in a super realist style), a bit of architectural moulding, a splash of light from an opened door, are all set within a dark painted field of shadow. The balustrade of a stair, more bulbous than real life, suggests some ubiquitous Victorian hallway. Crucially, Caulfield is not interested in making value judgements about the places and objects he depicts. They are simply part of the world we inhabit and therefore rich in associative but overlooked meaning. This kind of festishisation of the familiar and the everyday has of late become a popular part of design. Look at something like Habitat’s new Spindle lampstand and you can see Caulfield’s subtle exaggeration of the generic. Now that the playful evocation of kitsch and homely objects is acceptable (in design, if not in architecture), Caulfield’s technique suddenly seems rather prophetic.

Caulfield’s art has sometimes been dismissed as lightweight, chiefly I suspect because of its approachability. The depiction of familiar scenes and the use of an easily understood designer’s shorthand marks him out perhaps as not being ‘difficult’ enough. But this technique is used not just to depict objects in the way that a designer might, but to include emotional as well as technical content. And he subverts the authority of this mode by slipping into different styles, brief moments of painterly expressionism, perfectly coloured and detailed patterns and fragments of other paintings. By showing the world in subtly shifting and eliding codes (figurative, abstract, painterly, cartoon, technical) Caulfield shows us that nothing is ‘authentic’ and everything is in the eye of the beholder, even, and perhaps especially, the idea of unmediated experience. He also shows us that the most familiar objects and places can be made uncanny and remarkable all over again.