New Town Boy

Last week I went to Harlow. Harlow is set to double in size over the next few years, expanding further and further out into the Essex and Hertforshire countryside. While I was there I was thinking of Simon Jenkins' recent dispiriting article in the Guardian railing against the government's plans for new Eco Towns. Jenkins article was not just depressingly locked into a worldview that always equtes 'new' with 'worse' but factually suspect. His contention that the housing shortage could be dealt with exclusively through development of brownfield sites within existing cities, is a hoary old chestnut of an idea effectively dismantled by James Heartfield in this book, amongst others. It is also predicated on the assumption that people will be content with only one housing choice which is a one bedroom micro flat over a dual carriageway.

Harlow is interesting because it represents an optimistic period when there was a sense with the New Towns that someone was actually planning a better future. Its expansion however will inevitably be described as 'concreting over the countryside'. This claim is routinely made about absolutely any new building despite the fact that only something like between 8 and 10% of the UK's landmass is currently built on. Cities are now mysteriously assumed to be static entities that have existed in their present state forever. Their physical extent is always assumed to be at a maximum and that any further development will result in mindless 'sprawl'.

Harlow itself is kinda nice. Designed in the early 1950's and featuring the UK's first residential tower it represents a Scandinavian influenced light-Modernism similar in spirit to the Royal Festival Hall and equally reviled by the Brutalist generation that came after it. It is very much a jumbo cord, holidays in St Ives sort of modernism with bits of slightly camp decoration allowed to creep in around the edges and lots of improving public art. But now, in the wake of what came after it, is seems bracingly modern again, with a scale and expansiveness alien to most English architecture. It also feels slightly lost, its optimistic qualities of civic expression inevitably enveloped by a misty nostalgia, its elegant signage and domestic scaled public art slightly lost in the new shopping precinct. Still, you can sense something of the optimism that infused its conception, a diluted still palpable piece of futurism landing in the Essex countryside.

The Only Mistake

Quite why I don’t know but I thought I should make some sort of a defence of Control, despite The Impostume’s near definitive demolition job, not to mention this eloquent undermining of what both writers see as the underlying misogyny of the film,

It’s hard to disagree with much said to be honest but….but….I liked it! So, much as I don’t like to defend anything done by anyone who had anything to do with photographing men in the desert wearing waistcoats…….here goes.

Well first I have to concede a few points. The film is indeed clunky in places, suffering from the perils of all bio-pics in trying to bring to life events that have passed into popular folklore. And yes, the off screen scream of Deborah Curtis is pretty funny. It reminded me of Lust for Life, the histrionic 1950’s film about Van Gogh, where the camera pans away from a wild eyed Kirk Douglas shaving, to pause before we hear the pay off: “Ouch”!

That the film falls between the fantastical artifice of a Velvet Goldmine and a more realist debunking of rock’s aura is also true. But, it does have a visual poetry that lifts it out of the workmanlike storytelling of a film like Walk the Line. And, like that film it too struggles to convey anything much about the, ahem, creative process. Curtis goes from listening to Gean Jeany to appearing fully formed, on stage doing his strange demonically possessed Mr Bean-like dance. Not much is communicated of Curtis’ artistic reference points either, save perhaps for his penchant for reciting Romantic poetry.

But Control has some great moments and, crucially, perhaps more emotional complexity than it has been given credit for. The main criticism seems to be the films perpetuation of the male myth of madness/genius as well as rock’s indigenous sexism. Well, yes, but its hard to make a film about a male rock star and avoid that accusation isn’t it? I mean, if you buy into the idea of Ian Curtis as a character worthy of biography, then its difficult to avoid his own role in the perpetuation of the doomed romantic myth as well as the particular version of it that has grown up around him since. Also, the film tries hard to deconstruct some of those myths.

There is a moment for example where Deborah Curtis effectively grants Curtis permission to leave her, offering him exactly what he appears to want (The word permission is the right one here because he has effectively ASKED if he can leave). But her answer is still not good enough for him. There’s a dull resignation on her part that he’s just no longer worth hanging onto, that their relationship is effectively dead. I’d even say that the film grants her a quiet dignity at this point were it not likely to invite the obvious criticism that quiet dignity is the lot of all the other understanding but passive women in rock. But more importantly, Curtis doesn’t walk away because he recognises that this won’t make him happy either. She has to want it too. But she will never want it so he can never leave. Her stoic dignity is not enough, not what he wants either.

This is not so much a; “Women! Can’t live with ‘em, can’t live without ‘em!” moment as a recognition of genuine conflict. As much as he has bought into the romantic myths of rock’n’roll he’s also bought into the romantic myths of, well, romance too. The film makes clear that Curtis is drawn equally to both in a way that seems to reflect less the trauma of some pampered rock star than the genuine tensions between two kinds of obligation, two competing fantasies. It also effectively communicates his genuine idealism, which is exactly NOT to live out some corny Jim Morrison fantasy.

Perversely it is Curtis’ idealism that drove his decision to marry young and it is this that makes him commit suicide, not his sense of being trapped in some kind of domestic prison. If he is trapped it is in his inability to compromise. Like Kurt Cobain, as much as he conforms to the stereotype of joining what Syd Vicious’ mum called ‘that stupid club’, he contradicts it.

Curtis is far from the regular philandering bastard, or even the irregular one, and I’m not sure the film lets him off the hook either. Sure, it romanticises, but it also seems more nuanced, more aware of the contradictions and less enamoured of the clichés of rock’n’roll. Maybe these are simply the bits of Deborah Curtis’ book slipping through what might have been a more standard hagiography. Certainly Corbijn self-consciously recreates the myth making photographs he took of the band back then, a kind of double narcissism for sure, but also a poignant gesture. There is something intriguing about the same person recreating these images, something less distanced, less routine than the normal stuff of biography.

Finally, and there seems to be some agreement on this, the live music scenes are phenomenal, communicating Joy Division’s perverse mix of feral energy, primal dirge and baroque magnificence. The utterly un-rock’n’roll nature of Curtis’ elegantly mannered baritone, its lack of grit, grunt or any of the conventional signifiers of passion was part of his charisma, and his contradictions.

It’s true though about the clothes. They all look too cool.

(With acknowledgments to Mr Nigel Mapp for his insights.)

Cock and Bull

Preview: Skin + Bones: Parallel Practices in Fashion and Architecture

First off I just want to be clear about this. I haven't - as they used to say on the NME letters page, and probably, for all I know, still do - even been to the gig . This is a preview of Skin and Bones, or more accurately, a review of the comments it has received so far. The show might be brilliant so it is not a reflection of that but....

The relationship between fashion and architecture (I know, I know) is a sticky one and usually follows one of three paths. So far comments about the Skin and Bones show have not bucked the trend.

The first of these is the most inane and the easiest to dismiss, which is that architects sometimes design shops for fashion designers. Herzog and De Meuron and Koolhaas for Prada and Jamie Fobert for Givenchy for example. As architects also design shops for other things this doesn't really reveal too much but it does allow for some good joint luvvying between stars of both professions. This week's Time Out goes for this angle with some excellent mutual back scratching from Thomas Hetherwick and Hussein Chalayan. Not much is revealed of the, ahem creative process, but everyone is a huge admirer of each others work, natch. The purpose of these chats is usually to safeguard the myth of some cosmic world order of genius and generally bolster the rep of anyone involved.

Leading on from this is the marginally more entertaining analysis of What Architects Wear. Hadley Freeman goes for this approach in the Guardian, starting pretty much where everybody usually does, with Zaha Hadid's taste for Issey Miyake. Again, no light is shed on the relationship except the inadvertent truism that architects tend to be fairly anal about clothes and dress the same all the time. Indeed I once saw two pictures of Erno Golfinger, separated by about forty years, in which he was wearing exactly the same clothes. But mostly, we are in the realm of shallow biography and glorified people watching.

The third and seemingly most promising connection concerns suggested similarities between the process of designing clothes and designing buildings. What's more the two are deemed to be analogous, as suggested by the shows title. A buildings structure, it is said, is like the bones of our body, 'clothed' by its cladding, or skin. This all sounds very suggestive and intriguing at first but only ever remains suggestive because the similarities are metaphorical rather than literal. I mean, yeah I get it, but still.....it's kinda not that true either. Yes, cladding could be said to be like clothes, but equally it could be said that it's not. Buildings are huge, immovable and inanimate objects, unlike bodies. Cladding panels are not in the least bit like the fabrics from which my clothes are made. A cladding that stops short to reveal the structure does not have the genuine capacity to shock as, say, a mini skirt once did. Bodies inhabit buildings, but they are not the same as them. It seems facile to pretend otherwise and to test the analogy beyond breaking point.

Worse, this kind of talk often ends up in the often vacuous world of 'organic' architecture, the idea that curves and organic shapes are somehow sensuous and of the body. From here it is usually only a short step to a Swiss Tony-ish love of buildings shaped like a beautiful woman. Again, the sheer difference between huge lumps of metal and stone bolted together and the biological complexity of the body proper only reinforce how little the two are actually alike. The initial suggestiveness of the idea gives way to a sense of the distance between them and that, if architecture does anything well it is certainly not in mimicking the human body.

There is though a more fruitful area of connection between fashion and architecture, one that resists many of the cliches listed above. This connection lies in the actual process of fashion, what you might call its operation, or, how it works.

High fashion works today almost as a pure form of post-modernism (if you'll forgive the obvious oxymoronic qualities of that). Through a process of neurotic and constant one-upmanship it recycles the past, alighting on discarded, outmoded forms and re-presents them back to us as desirable, valuable. It does this almost as a provocation. It challenges us to wear these unwanted things again, using the object's transgressive powers of revulsion to test our mettle and challenge us to see the irony, understand the sophistication behind it.

Fashion manufactures value in the most flagrant and audacious way. It recycles value-less objects and makes us pay through the nose for them. For this reason it is the most blatantly capitalist of the arts, and also the most paranoid. Fashion designers are the closest to salesmen of any artist, and they know it. For this reason, they exaggerate the tropes of artyness, always attempting to appear loftily caught up in the act of creation.

It is also, if only for these reasons, one of the most interesting art forms. Its deeply shallow (sic) ephemerality, its shameless hucksterism, the fact that is literally is the Emperor's New Clothes, makes it a challenge to authenticity and the idea that meaning is immovably located in objects of known and irrefutable value.

Architecture is big on authenticity. It is also fearful of the ephemeral. The idea that architecture itself might be susceptible to fashion, that its forms may be anything to do with mere style, is a constant threat to the conceits of architectural culture. The really interesting thing about Koolhaas' Prada store is his fashionability, the choice of him to design it, not crass analogies between glazing details and hemlines. Koolhaas knowingly transgresses boundaries of taste and acceptability, throws what we fear and despise back at us as a provocation. His work uses the grab bag of history cleverly, shifting the radical chic of one era onto the seemingly empty forms of another. The current ubiquity of his work though, his utter fashionability right now, also holds within it the potential for its own destruction. There is nothing so unfashionable, of course, as the recently fashionable.

Skin + Bones: Parallel Practices in Fashion and Architecture is at Somerset House, London WC2, from April 24 until August 10.