Thinking About Design Festivals

I have signed up for Manchester School of Art Unit X option to work on a consultancy to help develop a Manchester Design Festival. The MSA is collaborating with Manchester City Council and City Co to help create an innovative, attractive, effective, and interesting city-wide design festival.

Notes from presentations by Marcus Lord, Fiona Curran and Mark Beecroft:

Design festival could include Fine Art, Film, Design, Architecture and Photography.

Aim: to promote professional creative artists, emerging talent, a catalyst to future collaborative partnerships, and also to contribute to the regeneration of the city.

Other Design Festivals to consider:

The Eindhoven Model / Dutch Design Week (October). Uses established and ‘non-traditional’ spaces across the city.

“Giving new meaning to structure, form, line and equipment.”
Mieke Meijer

The Empty Shop Network

This is not about squatting. Each of Thompson’s Empty Shop Network projects abides by a “licence to occupy”. Acquiring short, very cheap leases for pop-up shops and arts ventures is simple at the moment: experts predict one in five of the shops currently lying empty will never again see service as a commercial enterprise, as a nation of shopkeepers realises it has too many shops.

Dan Thompson, ESN

Shop window trails. With viewing chairs.

Shipping Containers

Disused warehouses

Free Car Ferry to different sites

Social Areas

The Milan Design Festival

Showcase PROCESS

Festival of Ideas / Design Ideas / DROOG (Material Matters)

Questioning endless economic growth / tax on waste materials? / Re-cycle; up-cycle / Sustainability / the future

“The start of a thought experiment to speculate on design” Remmy Remakers

Sea Plastics Industry

Can collaboration change our lives?

DIALOGUE / DISCUSSION

MATERIALS AND WASTE

3D PRINTING

COLLABORATION

INTERVENTION / HACKING

RE/UP-CYCLING

Fendi & Design, Miami Craft Punk (2010)

LONDON DESIGN FESTIVAL. 100% DESIGN. September, Earls Court

ANTI-DESIGN FESTIVAL: NEVILLE BRODY

No_use; no_function; no_fear; non_stereotypical anarchy

STOCKHOLM DESIGN WEEK

80 sheets of mountains

DESIGN AS MORE THAN OBJECT

OBJECT AS PROCESS

OBJECT AS IDEA

Studio Swine – The Sea Chair Project

The Trafford Centre: Holding Fast to Hyper-realism

A visit to the Trafford Centre: Holding Fast to Hyper-realism

That the Trafford Centre in Greater Manchester is a ‘temple of consumerism’ is now somewhat of a cliché. The trouble is that once a cliché is born a mask is adorned. As a critical statement the ‘temple of consumerism’ is happily absorbed as an ironic item of faith by the very object of the criticism. The Trafford centre is a temple with all the delusions, illusions, persuasions, affirmations and convincing rhetoric that any religious cultic institution may hold fast to. But in the realm of the hyper-real even culturally critical terms can float on the dreamboat of surface advertising.

Various mottos could have been carved into the curved frontage of the Orient Zone entrance to the complex. “Abandon all hope you who enter” (from Dante’s Inferno) might have had a more witty irony than the Biblical “Hold fast that which is good” which greets us above the multi-pillared main entrance. The fuller quote from Thessalonians 5:21 is “Test all things; hold fast that which is good.”

A telling postmodern omission. Rather than an injunction to question and to discriminate the good from the bad, the curtailed quote seems to say “what you find here is good, just hold onto it and buy it”. It has become prescriptive rather that educative. Nowhere to be seen is “Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves…” Matthew 7:15-20.

The architectural style supporting the quote is grandiose and pseudo-classical/rococo/baroque flecked with deco. The sway of thought is that if someone put this much money, effort and materials in, then of course it must be good. Hold that thought. Hold fast.

“Hyper-real places are characterised by surface appearances that do not respond to or welcome the viewer. The sense of sight is condensed to the most immediate and visible aspects of the scene, such as…the ocean liner environment at Manchester’s Trafford Centre….(Urry,J. (2002) The Tourist Gaze, pg.149).

Interesting that the site was owned by the Manchester Ship Canal Company until 1986, when the company was acquired by John Whittaker of Peel Holdings, who went on to build the Centre. In the Orient food hall we are in the expanded belly of a 1930’s cruise ship with seating for 1600 customers. In place of onboard entertainment is a cinema screen dedicated, not to 1930’s movies (which might have posed a more complex, if still ironic, redeeming factor for pre-hyper-reality), but a constant stream of video adverts. In the blue sky-dome, above the onboard diners, gilded reindeers soar as the necessary early harbinger (we are still in October) of the central ecstasy of the consumer religious calendar – Xmas. I think ‘Xmas’ rather than ‘Christmas’ is the appropriate word. Ex-mas, as in ‘no longer mass’ or ‘Not-mass’. As in ex-communicated. We have been thrown out of Church but before we can grieve the loss of God, we are instantly reassured by familiar tropes: the great glass dome (similar to St.Paul’s in London, yet bigger); angels with blaring trumpets (no longer announcing the ‘good news’ but the new goods); and an overwhelming sense of a benign presence, soothing, all knowing (knowing what you want), all loving (offering all you need). And if you have been ex-communicated from a more pagan context there is still the Egyptian parade of Pharos, the Ankh of life, the Sun God Ra, and the Eye of Horus looking after things. Tucked away, behind a lamp-post and to the side of a rack of daily tabloids is a meditating Buddha. He’s having a laugh.

 

Just past the Buddha is an impressive glimpse of an eggshell blue 380SL Mercedes. I’m seduced. That’s why the Buddha is having a laugh. My critical eye has glazed over. She’s beautiful. Always a sucker for the divine feminine. Surely this isn’t a case of the ‘hyper-real’. This is real. There is no irony here. This is a modernist car. It’s not a replica. I could drive it away. It could be my escape engine from the hell of the hyper-real. And now my post-modern head is spinning. Can you have a religious fall in a pseudo-temple? Can you have a real epiphany in a hyper-real sanctum? Could I go through a Dante-esque journey within the confines of a mega-mall? Where would Dante place the hyper-real in his circles of purgatory?

‘This car belonged to Mrs Margaret Mary Whittaker the Mother of the Chairman and Founder of Peel Holdings plc and the Trafford Centre. It is installed at the Trafford Centre as a lasting tribute for all her support, inspiration and guidance.’

Christ! It is the sacred feminine – Mary the Mother. Supportive, guiding, inspiring…..I go down one one knee and take a photograph.

I walk past the ejaculating fountain. The droplets peak in a circlet of baubles. Behind, the painted geese are startled, and a woman in an orange robe reveals a voluptuous breast.

I go and buy some trousers in Marks & Spencer’s.

I’m feeling empty and somehow I have to make my way back to the car park. There is a gravitational force field, the glass arches are not windows to the sky but containers for air. I notice the air is heavy. No breezes in the Trafford Centre. Even the endless movement of visitors doesn’t seem to cause a slight current. People don’t rush around the Trafford Centre, they percolate. It’s like walking through melted celluloid. Every shop is a gooey frame from a well known movie. Here the air is invented.

I’m trying to get to the car park but the floor has made me go into New Orleans. Hyper-real feng shui due to close proximity to China Town. How do you make artificial dust? At least there is a toilet nearby. In the toilet is a red-waistcoated man. He is mopping the floor. He has been mopping the floor for ever. With his bent over back and repetitive sweep he has surrendered to the celluloid air.

Why am I buying anti-bacterial hand-wipes in Boots? I’m sure there aren’t any bacteria in the Trafford Centre.

I stopped taking photographs just after the incident with the Holy Mary Mercedes. My camera became very heavy. Anyway, my M&S bag with my new trousers was making it seem like a palava to get the camera out of my back pack. There was probably a subliminal message, just below hearing range, telling me that I didn’t need to look any more closely. Oh, there was. The absence of the first part of the biblical quote on the way in. They got me. Right at the entrance. The religion only works to the degree you don’t ask questions. The Temple is mighty.

Google Earth shot of Trafford Centre

I was ex-communicated from the Trafford Centre.

The labyrinth of minor roads out of the Temple Grounds was less complex than on the way in. They didn’t need me any more.

Google Earth shot of Trafford Centre

In the car, as I left the Orient Zone, I started sneezing.

Google Earth shot of Trafford Centre

I reached for my anti-bacterial wipes.

Slowly I started to notice things like rain, and clouds, and autumn leaves.

And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. (Genesis 1:31)

Notes Towards a ‘Project Proposal’

The next major phase of the course is looming. From November through to end of February next year I need to consolidate and focus my individual practice. This will involve submitting a self-defined ‘project proposal‘ with a view to producing a ‘body of work‘.

The project can have one major outcome or a series of related smaller outcomes. 

Guidelines for proposals:

• research – what cultural/social issues, theories, or types of practice will I investigate?

• experimentation – what will I try out?

• interests – why is this relevant to me and to an audience?

• personal voice – how will my unique approach be expressed?

• ambitious – how will this be challenging?

Goals will include:

• knowing my research territory – the kind of practitioner I want to be, issues that interest me

• selecting skills to explore the territory – the techniques I will use, or I still need to learn

• establishing rigour – how I judge or edit my practice and test it on other people

• resolving practice – finishing, achieving a final outcome

• approaching professional standards – production values, quality of making

 

Pre-proposal reflections

I’m looking forward to this phase of learning and practice. But I’m trepidatious too. I think this could be a pivotal point in my process and could quite strongly effect what I do for the rest of the course and beyond.

I am not sure what it means to establish a ‘personal voice’.

It is interesting to consider what an ‘impersonal voice’ might be. How does an artist take his or her personality or identity out of the artwork? Can there be a de-centred art? How does anonymity square with the modern/postmodern trend of individualism? Can a visible artwork have an invisible author? What about invisible art or the ‘Art of the Invisible‘? Can we, or should we, surrender to ‘the death of the author‘ (and hence the birth of the viewer)?

But what might it mean to establish a personal voice? Ego-centricity aside, I think it means to clarify one’s preoccupying questions. To find a focus of central concern. To establish a sustained field of dialogue over a period of time. To discover one’s passion and driving force. To locate eros (in the broadest creative sense of the god/archetype). To find the project to which one can’t help but return to. To act from authenticity (over-used term, but meaning to come from a place of conviction and inner confidence).

It then means to find means and methods of bringing form to those questions, concerns, and preoccupations. To create a coherence and cohesiveness of idea and expression.

It also means finding the right relationship and understanding of one’s own individual conditions as an artist to the context(s) in which one finds oneself. (An area rich in philosophical debate and consideration is of course the relationship between individual and society; autonomy and collectivity; individuation and community). Our individual conditions perhaps include personal history, class, race, nationality, educational background, body, health, sexual orientation etc. And the broader (and indeed overlapping) contexts include political landscape, media influence, educational structures and agendas, economic forces (local, national, and global), cultural assumptions and clashes, urban planning, scientific advances, technological emergence, environmental/climate change, popularised theories of psychology, ethnology and sociology etc.

Given the scale of the implications of all this it is not surprising I feel somewhat daunted to crystallise my project proposal. The art of the artist has probably always come down to the necessity of critical selectivity. The point of a proposal is to establish some creative parameters as a protection against overwhelming possibilities. Infinity is not a creative space. So the creative process can be defined as the art of limitation. Paradoxically there is always more one can do in a limited space than in an unlimited space. The main caveat here being that we have to distinguish between ‘supportive limit’ and ‘oppressive restriction’. Perhaps there has to be a sense of porosity to the limited structures we propose for ourselves. There has to be a seepage of influence across the skin of our constraints. The limits we set in the artistic process have to be intelligent and are validated in the act of making, the process of the project, and the sense of liberative energy revealed along the way. A motto might be ‘freedom within limits’.

What is a generalist to do?

I’m eclectic (rhymes with dyslexic, which as a condition also has its upside and downside).

Which just comes back to a question – given broad interests, what might a body of work look like?

A quick brainstorm of words that motivate me:

CONNECTION;CONNECTIVITY; COMMUNITY; CO-OPERATION

FREEDOM; PLAY; DANCE; JOY

VITALITY; VIVACITY; AWARENESS

CURIOSITY; QUESTIONING

DIVERSITY; CULTURAL RICHNESS

EVOLUTION; EMERGENCE

DEATH; LOSS; GRIEF

And I’m still no nearer my proposal.

Contextual Glare: Response to Susan Sontag’s ‘In Plato’s Cave’

This is a short response further to my previous blog notes and quotes from Sontag’s essay

The word that comes up over and over is ‘context’. A photograph is never isolated from its original context and is modified when presented in new contexts. This challenges me to be more aware of context. But I’m aware there is both external and internal context. For example a photograph of a child in a war zone has a different meaning to the same child abstracted from the context (i.e. one could cut and paste the child out of the broader picture). The external context is changed. But the internal context of the viewer can be vastly varying. Internal mood is internal landscape; is internal context. If I was depressed and looked at the picture of the child in the war zone I would read it very differently than, say, if I was feeling positive, or inspired by the possibility of change in the world. So, it does raise the question of the complexity of context – what does ‘context’ mean? Context in itself is selective. The same photo of a child on a charity leaflet reads differently from the same photo in the midst of an array of newspaper columns, or placed in a fictional film, or used in fascist propaganda pamphlets, or with a humorous caption beneath it.  Then of course there is the social, class, racial conditioning we bring to the photo. Someone raised in a war zone will read the photograph differently from someone raised in a zone of peace and relative stability. So any certainties of contextual definition become very fluid, multivalent and complex. There is no such thing as ‘a context’. There are nested contexts, and provisionally selected contexts. Re-contextualistion is always a possibility, de-contextualisation is always a possibility. Perhaps the most important thing is to always be bringing awareness to the contextual assumptions we hold. That is not always an easy practice as those assumptions are often unconsciously embedded, and further, those assumptions give us security in our familiar perspectives.

This is why Sontag’s essay if so important – she is teasing out assumptions. These are the shadows on the back wall of Plato’s Cave – although we are locked in the Cave, confusing shadow dancers for reality, we resist exiting the mouth of the cave. The contextual glare is terrifying.