THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BREEZEBLOCKS

[Dreaming on the Danube: Budapest in its tranquility... looks kind of boring.]

Contemporary Budapest could hardly be accused of being a suffocating urban experience. Along the banks of the Danube it exists as a city spacious, green and awash with finely preserved architectures representing all different periods of its cultural legacy. It’s as far away from the anxiety-inducing urban diasporas of modern metropolises like Tokyo and Beijing as it is the greying design dead-weights of European eyesores Oslo and Berlin.

Perhaps it was the Hungarian capital’s successful rejection of modern urban sprawl that gave architect Áron Losonczi the clarity to envision a literal contribution to shedding light on the condition of contemporary concrete jungles, which are growing out of control elsewhere around the globe.

[Envision a city held up by light]

His translucent concrete building blocks are created by forming matrices of tiny fibre optic glass shards within a homogeneous concrete base that allow light to pass straight through the material without it undermining its strength or durability. It has been used as a tool of art, as it was for a monument in the town Komárom to celebrate Hungary’s entry into the EU, but has also been absorbed into the urban environment as a tool of commerce, for example in Berlin’s flagship Benchshop, where the changing rooms are separated by the silhouette-rendering material.

[The Shadowpuppetry of Shopping]

Regardless of its aesthetic appeal, which to my eye seems incompletely realised in its non-geometric yet non-arbitrarily arranged, messily layered patterning, understanding ‘Litracon’ (as it has been trademarked) as a tool for shaping the individual’s urban experience offers much food for thought.

The prison-like nature of compact accommodation in densely packed, functionally designed apartment blocks is the bane of boom cities all across Asia who have gone from rice fields to high risers in the space of a generation and in the process have sacrificed the development of a correspondingly dynamic urban identity that treats its people as creative beings as opposed to drones.

Where the tranquillity and rhythm of light has been beaten out of a citizenship’s routine by unabated growth (and most probably smog) and where peoples’ interactions are made less intimate by the day despite their ever increasing physical proximity, buildings incorporating translucent concrete on a larger scale could subtly reinject a sense ‘naturality’ and ‘lightness’ into the otherwise synthetic urban space – and by extension hint at the potential for transcendence and movement in an otherwise static place.

An otherwise unremarkable room in an apartment building, featureless and without warmth, could become a dynamic canvas for daily light performances as the colours, shapes and shadows of light passing through its walls would forever invest it with a constant sense of revision and change. It would become a lifeblood; oxygen running through the body.

And after invigorating the individual, its transmitting of silhouettes from one room to another might re-connect the citizens torn of their sense of community, with the ceaseless show of other people’s lives projected onto their own, ironising in their busyness the lonely shadows of ourselves that we might all have at one time become.

An entire city made of translucent concrete would turn it into a kaleidoscopic sundial, closer to the fluid economic and urban infrastructure ideal that our urban efforts all purport to be in aid of than many of our contemporary cities could ever dream of in their dull, industrious facelessness.

[Embracing the void beyond order]

Sticking our nose over Hungary’s garden fence: when anti-government demonstrators in neighbours Romania famously protested in the streets in 1989, they waved a Romanian flag with the communist star at its centre cut out and discarded, allowing the free flow of light to pass through the space where they symbol of a rigid social organisation once stood. As a powerful visual indicator of the ideological shift that was taking place, it was impossible to misinterpret – light reprising its role once more as a signifier of movement, change and freedom – the same role it has played so frequently before throughout the human imagination’s rendering of history.

Modern architectural landscapes are complex and difficult to understand. We can never know a city no matter how much we love it – a city can betray us with its secrets and inaccessibilities in more ways than a girlfriend or boyfriend ever could. When the transient presence of light is re-focused as a central player in the way we experience the design of a city space, it would ease the sense of obligation we feel in confronting and coming to terms with the urbanity which we are a part of and constantly threatens to engulf us. We must always seek to cut a hole in the scene that is presented before us to let light burst through and illuminate it in new, invigorating ways.

Light is a void, an absence, but one that we do not fear – we a drawn to it. When we are bathed in light we are confronted with the emptiness that exists before us and our grand distracting cityscapes, and if we overcome the denial of its empty nature we are comforted in its all-encompassing simplicity. It reminds us of the nothingness from where we came, and gives us scope to explore new areas we didn't realise were there before.

For a city to deny the role of light is to deny its own life source; for a city to thrive it must make light the most privileged inhabitant of its architectural arrangement.

Now all Litracon has to do is make their translucent breezeblocks just a little bit prettier, and - who knows? - the urban light revolution could still happen yet…

LET'S STOP 'COS WE'VE HAD ENOUGH

[Beastly Evolution: Bubbles & MJ]

Michael Jackson’s Neverland Ranch is a dumpster for late capitalist kitsch. To trawl through this wasteheap of wanton; a scattering of symbols culled from a dead era, would be as good for one’s health as it is hygienic sniffing through piles of hospital waste on all fours searching for shit-filled nappies. 

Yet still there must be some of us who are convinced of finding truffles amongst the turds, as this April an auction of artefacts from Jackson’s golden years will take place in Beverly Hills.

Amongst the items due to go under the hammer is a signed letter to the King of Pop from Ronald Reagan in 1984. As well as commiserating MJ’s bonny black locks getting frazzled during the making of a Pepsi commercial, it thanks him for being a great role model for America and embodying its spirit:

"Dear Michael, I was pleased to learn that you were not seriously hurt in your recent accident […]All over America, millions of people look up to you as an example. Your deep faith in God and adherence to traditional values are an inspiration to all of us, especially young people searching for something real to believe in. […] Keep up the good work, Michael. We're very happy for you."

Why would someone pay an estimated $500 for this piece of junk?

As the Frankenstein of capitalist reform, giving private corporate industries like Pepsi the unstoppable power to run their businesses unabated, Reagan’s letter to Michael Jackson (the epitome of the 1980’s brand of MTV consumerism) can be seen as him acknowledging perfection in the monster that the spark of his science brought to life. (Fitting as the spark that instigated the writing of the letter was in this instance a very literal one.)

[It wasn't your fault, Michael.]

If we assume the letter will be acquired by a private individual, in coughing up for the honour of owning this icon of our indulgences (and by extension our demise) they border on commiting an act of masochism. It is a delusional act of commodity fetishism made even more empty and irrelevant by the contemporary global context that no longer supports it. Whoever pays $500 for this framed piece of memorabilia is a bridled fool.

With the beastly legacy of Reaganomics having run rampant for nearly three decades, it is only now during the onset of a fierce global recession, a depletion of world resources, an exposure to the extent of corporate entities’ destructive business practices and the gradual emergence of a social mindset that factors in aspects beyond the desires of the individual, seeking a fresh pluralistic model of creating social liberty and sustainability, that the monster has come to destroy itself.

Yet what vengeance has it wrought on us in the mean time? What that we need for our sustenance and deem irreplaceable – like Frankstein holding his wife Elizabeth’s dead body after it has been mauled by his monster – have we lost for good?  The environment? Our resources? Our stability? Our sense of being? It is too early to tell the extent of damages done…

[The Angelus Novus. Looks a bit like Michael Jackson actually.]

Thinking of the futility of the individual wishing to hold on to such empty historical flotsam as the Reagan/Jackson epistle I am reminded of Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus, or ‘The Angel of History’ as it was potently re-read by Walter Benjamin:

"His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress."

In our current state of transition is it not up to us to adopt the role of the angel? Time blows us forward so why do we still seek to narrativise the past in a way that will always be myth-making, always broken and incomplete? Always leaving us lost and detached from ourselves, a fetishised popular culture destabilises our self-control and we are left open to the manipulations of others that are more powerful.

For us to make progress we must acknowledge that the past is out of reach and that any legacy that we envision having brought us to where we are now is in fact temporary and incomplete. The trade off we make when we choose to move forward is that we cannot take everything with us and may only tentatively look back. We must learn to foreground this in our minds as we seek new ways to interpret and understand the perpetual present that circulates around us.

If we are going to make the transformation successfully into the next phase of global socio-economic development we must cease to be the citizen fascinated with the wreckage at our feet (be it a historicised pop culture, politics or otherwise) and instead stand up straight and mould the storm of what is current as it passes through our hands.

Coinciding with the auction is Jackson’s announcement of him playing fifty final live shows at the O2 arena in London – his first full gigs since 1997. He shakily tells us at the press conference for the event launch that ‘THIS IS IT! THIS IS IT!’

[The number of rhinoplasties it will take to get Michael through all fifty shows in one piece.]

Let us hope that it really is ‘it’. Let us enjoy these shows for what they are and hope that the songs still sound as good performed live today as they did the first time around. But also, let them act as the apex of a transition into something new – a marker of what we are letting go of. It is the end of the postmodern narrative that we started writing over fifty years ago, that reached its dramatic mid-point in the 80s and is now scribing its own stunted epilogue and resigning itself to the past.

Let’s listen and learn once and for all what poor Jacko’s been trying to get us to understand all along. As a torch-bearer of an era that manipulated the equilibrium of our world beyond easy reconciliation: 

He’s bad.

MAKE LOVE NOT WARHOL!

Rarely is there progress without a little bit of destruction so join me now in a ritual debunking of one of modern art’s sacred cows. 

[Original scribbles from a well wisher, left on the free-for-all daubing wall at the end of Taipei's Warhol Exhibition]

Since the start of January and for a few more weeks yet, the “Pope of Pop - Andy Warhol World Tour Exhibition” has been sat plumply in the basement of the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall in Taipei on the first leg of a tour that will see it crawl across Asia. It will visit boom-cities that, up until the recession hit, have been experiencing the kind of rapid economic growth supplying a standard of living the West first enjoyed back when Warhol was actually relevant.

That the tour kicked off in Taiwan’s capital is fitting – this is after all the island that for many is still foremost associated with cheap, mass-produced tat. And re-viewing the 122 Warhol Factory “originals” (however you might define “original” in the Warhol post-modern condition), threw up a stark revelation: what was once deemed worthy now stands artistically hollow and completely un-affecting. Not even cueing up The Velvet Underground & Nico on my mp3 player and attempting to regress into a state of what once was was capable of infusing the tired images with any kind of significance.  

Walking through the exhibition hall, filled mostly with young Taiwanese innocently mimicking the American fashion that links Fred Durst with 50 Cent via the spirit of a giant, soiled camouflage-print nappy, felt a lot like stepping into a nightmarishly over-sized Clinton Cards.  Marilyn Monroe, Lenin, The Marx Brothers, Marilyn Monroe again, all POPped until they’ve dropped. We’re so used to seeing reprints in student poster-sales, what on earth could looking at an ‘original’ do or say today?

It seemed each of these famous images’, now saturated by the commodity culture on which they once commented, sole purpose was as a shopping aid to visitors - the exhibition’s real climax was The Gift Shop. Here creativity came courtesy of the cash register as the dull old designs were re-appropriated on to pencil cases, t-shirts, tea towels and even little Velvet Underground Banana face-masks to protect locals’ little lungs from the Taipei smog.

[An array of colourful shit. You should know better.]

There may be renewed interest bestowed upon Warhol from the gaze of young Chinese and Taiwanese citizens caught up in the excitement of their country’s rapid development, but they’re just playing catch-up and as an imported fad he’ll never outlive the 15 minutes of fame that he himself invented. 

Yes, Yes, we all know Warhol’s modus operandi was to celebrate and exploit the mass-culture movement that must have unfurled before him and his peers like – well - the burst of rainbow colour that Coke-Cola are currently using to try and illustrate what comes out of their bottles if you drink enough of them – but that was fifty years ago. Just because he and everybody else knew and embraced what he was doing then, it doesn’t let him off the hook when we look at him now. 

In 1963 Warhol said “Pop art is loving things. Loving things means being like a machine, because it does the same thing over and over again.” Today’s dilemma is we’re starting to hate things. Things require resources – we’re running low on them. We need money for things – we don’t have any money! Things are made by machines – but the capitalist machine we (and Warhol) placed our trust in has had a terminal seizure and right now we’ve no alternative providing-bosom to suckle on. We simply don’t have the means to do the same thing over and over again any more – even if we wanted to.

With the old consumer model of living, with which Warhol constantly antagonised, having had the rug pulled from beneath its feet by financial meltdown, the threat of climate change and running out of natural resources, the scope of interpretation and discussion inspired by a tin of Campbell’s Soup today is painfully out-dated. Wastrel art students and other dumb young scenesters using Warhol’s legacy for inspiration (from his own images to the visual advertising culture it underscored) will, for as long as they continue to engage with him seriously, always struggle to say anything genuinely new. You wouldn’t turn to Beowulf to communicate Britain in 2009, similarly Warhol’s had his window to transmit but now times have move on.

[maybe.]

The one overwhelming realisation that came to me when standing face to face with the Mick Jagger and Chairman Mao lithographs was just how far from this state of post-WWII creative delirium we’ve come, that Warhol today can only be viewed as nostalgia, and how desperate we should be for a new pan-global mainstream art movement to see us through this next great wave of social-global change. 

The first half of the 20th century saw avant-garde artists envisioning future status quos, the second half was spent settling into them and reflecting. It is early days still for the twenty-first century, but it’s time for young people with the arts in their eyes to put Warhol and his legacy behind them once and for all, and in his place unite to start working boldly towards something completely new.

STOP THE WARHOL! 

FIRST THINGS FIRST

The avant-garde: "a band of soldiers preparing for general advance"

[Vladimir Tatlin's Tower: A Ukrainian crack-piper with his eyes on the future]

The Thing Consensus' primary impulse is one shared by many: that the current world climate of global, economic downturn and uncertainty will, through its destruction of old ideologies and status quos, create a clearing in space to usher in a new age of ideas, arts and approaches to living. 

At the start of the 20th Century the Russo-European avant-garde was shaking things up and giving form to the conflicting ideas that would race into shaping the next one hundred years. Today the European tradition of fin de siècle degeneration and hope has been superseded by a world united by modern infrastructure, politics, technology and communication in a perpetual present we now know is too complex to even try to weave into a handful of coherent narratives. We may take cues from the last great avant-garde, but what we advance into is unknown. 

In the spirit of the focal shift uniting the East with the West, The Thing Consensus acknowledges the world today in the Japanese katoki no kaisha - the start of the transition. In this transition The Thing Consensus exists to posit ideas to thread throughlines through the myriad maze of symbolic markers that define the contemporary experience. Through earnest eyes The Thing Consensus would like to see a new avant-garde of the twenty-first century marching through the hole that has been torn through the world's socio-economic fabric, instigating reforms through cultural disciplines and the arts in order for us to cope with the fresh demands made by our aesthetic reality.

[Japanese Architect Tadao Ando designed 'temporary' offices in Tokyo. Photo by Necasa & Partners Inc®] 

The Thing Consensus is an online sandbox of speculation and attitudes that aims to contribute in bringing young people to an agreement on what it is we have around us. In the relative stability of the last 25 years (The Thing Consensus' average age), social, political, artistic and intellectual activism has been by turns a a fashion, a cliché, a pretense and a punch line. Yet for the first time in many of our lives, urgent creative activity has been rid of its impotence and from Iceland to Indonesia a new class of young artisans shall push forth in the face of global roll-back.

Our world is a broken scattering of things we've lost sense of. Let's put things back together.