The Death Of The Author

The image at the top of this post is David Greene’s Log Plug (one of a pair with his Rock Plug), a typically arch conflation of technology and the bucolic. Below it is a familiar contemporary version of exactly the same thing, a mobile phone mast disguised as a tree.

I was struck by the apposite way that this illustrates something I have written about before, which is the difference between art and technology, or more particularly the difference in how we experience products of art and products of technology.

The latest issue of architecture magazine Verb contains an excellent interview with architect and geographer John May who, amongst other things, manages to express this split much more eloquently than I have managed so far. His interview touches on the perceived difference between products of culture (e.g. architecture) and products of technology (e.g. engineering).

As May points out, products of technology are assumed to work in a quite straightforward, philosophically unproblematic way. That is until they ‘break’. Then they get fixed or, more likely replaced. Art and architecture on the other hand are never assumed to be either working or not working, functioning or broken. As products of culture their ‘success’ is subject to debate and negotiation, always qualified and always in progress. This is an important distinction and like most underlying values is all the more powerful for its insidious common sense.

John May points out that our assumptions about technology (and in particular the simple opposition that it is either working or not working) are naïve and simplistic. Following Paul Virilio’s notion that a ship brings with it the possibility of a shipwreck, May clouds the sense of whether technology is ever doing something as simple as working. Just as it might be working in one way for instance it may also be not working, or even causing catastrophic damage, in another. An example of this might be my new mobile phone. It is without doubt very good at picking up emails but it may also be very good at corroding my brain. Its eventual disposal will also contribute to enormous environmental problems. In what sense then could it be said to ‘work’ well? To ask this question is to sound almost infantile but is important in being able to articulate our relationship to technology.

Subtler still is the way that technology assumes a natural place within our culture, making a self-justifying space for itself. This relationship is complex and hard to unpick. Technologies greatest trick is to appear as if from nowhere, authorless and therefore untraceable. This is how engineering escapes our gaze. Whilst the architect stands in the middle of the room shouting about his/her creation – I did this! – the producers of engineering and infrastucture melt into the air, untraceable, unknowable, evading our critical judgement. We do not know how to criticise technology beyond a slightly baffled shrug or a luddite resignation that it is bound to go wrong. Beyond this we are lost, unable to assess technology as a cultural product, or to critically judge its impact on our lives.

Whatever You Want

The world of work, the real world of work, the one where people threaten to sue you if you don't provide the ironmongerry schedule on time, has overtaken my life such that this blog has been neglected a bit lately. I've also been writing elsewhere, including a review of Verb/Crisis for the next issue of Icon, a sort of excerpt from which is above. Also, for anyone interested who may have missed it, or couldn't find a copy, I've posted my review for last month's Icon on the 35th anniversary of Argos below....

Some thoughts on the 35th anniversary of Argos

I come not to bury, but to praise Argos. I’m a big fan. I had an argument at home recently when my girlfriend suggested throwing out my Argos catalogue collection. I was outraged! The Argos catalogue is an important archive of popular taste.

This year, the store is 35 years old. The latest catalogue is vast - 1891 pages which include everything from diamond engagement rings to two person saunas to jump leads. Where to start? Perhaps with the Spring issue of Argos’s stand alone Home catalogue. This seems a good place to look at high street design taste in 2008. Well, it would be if it weren’t for the fact that it is still 1997 in the Argos catalogue.

A desperate urge to be tasteful pervades the pages. The belated victory of polite modernism has created an atmosphere fearful of any kind of furnishing faux pas. The living rooms echo not particularly hip bar design from a decade ago. Low leather armchairs, big vases and lots of dark wood predominate. Back in the actual late ‘90’s, Argos was a much weirder place to be, full of enormous armchairs that looked like volcanic eruptions of fake leather and lurid pattern. The sort of thing you might find in a Bavarian guesthouse. The predominant tone today though is a kind of risk free modernism-lite, Ikea without the forced Scandinavian jollity.

Occasionally, amidst the beige, there is an object that has floral decoration creeping over it like fashion ivy, a tentative nod to more contemporary tastes in furniture. There are even black chandeliers, which means that the neo-baroque revival is now officially over.

Back in the big catalogue things are a lot more exciting. Take for example the Antony Worral Thompson 4 gas burner barbeque, a commercial size stainless steel oven that has grown wings, wheels and robotic arms. Or George Foreman’s lean, mean, grilling machine, the ultimate technological derivation of the toasted sandwich maker. Perhaps they’re both hoping that Kirsty Gallagher might pop by for a sausage after burning off some fat on her digital talking skipping rope. Argos has always been big on celebrity endorsement.

Fans of kitsch might like the solar rock garden lights, LED’s disguised as boulders, like a cross between Archigram’s rock plug and an ACME cartoon asteroid. Argos holds a mirror up to our bizarre materialist tastes. There are three pages devoted to dog settees one of which has a union jack on it and is shown next to its owner: a large bull dog. There are 37 pages of TV’s but only one slimline dishwasher. I know because I just bought it. There is also a mind-boggling amount of jewellery including a whole page just for Goths.

The Argos queue is a truly democratic place to be. In there you’ll be standing in line with a 14 year old buying a skull and crossbones necklace, a middle aged man buying all 26 figures in the Doctor Who micro universe collection, a very large family with a 20 person tent and a thirty something man struggling with a dishwasher.

Argos deserves to celebrate its 35th anniversary. From its love of crap celebrities and Status Quo to the humbling utility of its queuing system it has a bracing populist appeal. In an age of pseudo-ethical shopping designed to ease our troubled consciences, Argos belongs to a more optimistic era of consumerism. It remains an utterly un-pretentious way to shop. Plus there’s a part of me that will never quite lose the desire to have a racing car shaped bed.