Labour, work and play: action in fine art practice

These notes draw particularly on the ideas of Daniel Willis, as expressed in his book The Emerald City and Other Essays on the Architectural Imagination, (Princeton Architectural Press, New York, 1999), concerning the nature of different productive and unproductive forms of activity. Specifically, the demarcation of such activities in terms of the categories of labour and work are used as a basis for interrogating some forms of creative practice. One particular characteristic of both labour and work is found in its objective and subjective organization of time. These notes question those practitioners who produce ‘works’ of art by the means of labouring productive action, including its particular organization of time

Peripherals : the remainder and reminder of obsolescence

This paper focuses on peripherals and argues that they constitute both the remainder and the reminder of product obsolescence. The remainder as they tend not to be subject to the same processes of ‘disposition’ which characterise the flow of obsolescent and obsolete objects. Rather, they tend to accumulate and add to the clutter which increasingly occupies specific domestic locations. Indeed, the semi-permanent storage of peripherals may represent an attempt to symbolically delay the acceptance of the obsolescence of objects and to hold onto a sense of the value which they once had. Peripherals, may then, be functionally obsolete to the owner due to the dispossession of the products they once formed an extended aspect of. However, lack of durability or longevity is not their chief failing. Often unused, or little used, and usually being functionally simple, they have the ability to ‘hang around’ interminably

Satirising the bourgeois worldview: Patrick Hamilton’s Impromptu in Moribundia

As well as being a cultural product itself, literature provides a means for the critical interrogation of the processes of cultural production and consumption in class-structured capitalist society. Realist narrative, Utopian speculation and dystopian conjecture have all been used to good effect. So, too, have satire and fable, and these come together in a neglected and largely forgotten novel from 1939, Impromptu in Moribundia, written by the bourgeois Marxist Patrick Hamilton. Though dated in many ways, and clearly rooted in a particular social and political context, this fabulous tale, nevertheless, retains interest for those wishing to critique the production of the bourgeois cultural worldview

The texture of Utopia

To a large extent the history of Utopia has been intimately bound up with the city. Representations of Utopian futures have often been rendered as visions of ideal urban living. Moreover, a technologically driven cornucopia of material abundance has become a recurrent feature such that it is almost shorthand itself for Utopia. This paper will engage with the material culture of such Utopian representations - the buildings, the practical hardware of everyday life, the status of manual and mental labour, etc. It is the contention of this paper that most of these Utopian futures can be interpreted as representing the triumph of alienation and, hence, as anti-Utopian. The human body is ‘disappropriated’, abandoned to the sensory un-engaging qualities of Utopian material culture. An alternative approach to conceptualising the material stuff of Utopia will be advanced, one in which the full re-appropriation of the body is given a more central role

Reading 'Hangover Square': ideology and inversion in the novels of Patrick Hamilton

The novelist Patrick Hamilton (1904-1962) is routinely portrayed as an author of bleak but comic tales of thwarted love and unfulfilled desire. His ear for the banalities of everyday pub talk and his ability to articulate the internal contortions of the self-deluded are much remarked upon. However, his Marxism, which was crucially important to Hamilton, especially during the period coinciding with the appearance of his most masterful work, is routinely dismissed, sidelined or simply ignored. This is a curious omission given the contemporary proclivity for reading things into, rather than 'out of', texts. His one explicitly Marxist novel, 1939's Dystopian fable, 'Impromptu in Moribundia' is used as a convenient target to attack the literary manifestation of an apparently naive, ill-informed and jejune Marxism. In it Hamilton uses a technique of 'inversion' (linguistic, ideological, scientific and social) to produce a far reaching critique of English society and bourgeois culture set in an explicitly public, Dystopian space. After this critically and commercially unsuccessful novel, Hamilton produced 'Hangover Square' (1941) his most internal, sombre and pessimistic book. For many commentators it is his finest novel but one which is unconnected to its gauche predecessor. This paper argues that 'Hangover Square' uses the same technique of 'ideological inversion' (via the often criticised device of its chief character, George Harvey Bone, being prey to 'dead' moods during which the world is recast as unfamiliar) as found in 'Impromptu in Moribundia'. However, the result in 'Hangover Square' is the exploration of a private, Dystopian space dialectically linked to a description of a society heading towards the inevitable outbreak of war. Focusing predominantly on 'Hangover Square', it is argued that the novel represents an accomplished application of dialectical analysis, Dystopian pessimism, and the explosive resolution of objective contradictions

Whatever happened to normative drawing?

One hallmark of humanities inquiry is its motivation by normative concerns: a critical view of how things are and a corresponding vision of how things could be. Architects used to adeptly deploy the rhetorical approaches of humanities inquiry in the promotion of architectural visions. Today architecture seems to be dominated by technical and instrumental concerns and where a vision is articulated it is usually of transformed individual living rather than of a different society. Imaginative text and image based signifying strategies have largely given way to the ubiquity of computer generated plans, elevations, walk-throughs and unconvincing images of contrived and unlikely sociality

Re-valorizing rubbish: some critical reflections on ‘green’ product strategies

The last twenty years has seen the rise of a series of intellectual and practical responses to environmental degradation. Many socialists and critical theorists have sought to develop sophisticated analyses of ecological despoiling and have aimed to provide the contours of various ‘eco-socialist’ alternatives. These range from visions of small-scale communal autarky through ‘green’ or ‘eco-city’ concepts to global perspectives. Crucially, for most of these ecologically minded socialists, the social relations of capitalism rather than simply the ‘industrial mode of production’ has been the focus of critique. Where many liberal or reactionary environmentalists see the industrial processes of production and the wasteful activities of consumption as driving the planet towards ecological doom, most socialists seek to analyze the ways in which the relational social processes of capital augment, enlarge and exaggerate the ecological harm that results from industrial production and mass consumption

A culture of visible mending: improvisation, or bodging the job?

The first declaration of the MENDR\*S Manifesto is ‘To make mending visible’. I take this to have a double meaning. First, that mending as a practice has been hidden from view, eclipsed by a worship of disposable consumer culture. Second, that the mending of an object should itself leave a visible trace. This indication of repair might result from the addition of materials—patches, glue, stitching, etc., traces of workmanship (sic), or the radical reworking of the form of an object

Consumption, planned obsolescence and waste

In the five decades since Vance Packard published The Waste Makers (1960), planned product obsolescence has developed in many subtle and sophisticated ways. Yet its social and environmental impact remains largely unacknowledged; planned obsolescence continues to be elaborated and to undermine consumer choice, increase costs of owning and using products, accelerating the destruction of useful objects and resulting in higher levels of ecological spoiling. It is a phenomenon widely acknowledged though little discussed. Conceptual and empirical detail will be discussed in relation to i) ‘in-built’ technological obsolescence the design; development and incorporation of functionally fragile components leading to premature malfunction, ii) stylistic obsolescence; the styling or fashioning of myriad consumer objects such that they are deemed to have ‘worn out’ stylistically and aesthetically before they have failed functionally and, iii) the ‘superfluous within the necessary’; the over-elaboration of products such that they are functionally ‘overprogrammed’, the specific design of many objects such that they cannot be repaired or adapted for alternate uses and, the way that many products urge and often require the subsequent consumption of extra goods and services simply to maintain them

Cultural consumption and the myth of ‘life-style’

The concept of ‘life-style’ seems to have been thoroughly naturalised, both academically and in common parlance.There is little critical interrogation of what ‘life-style’ involves, beyond its connection to cultural and aesthetic aspects of consumption. What are the implications of accepting this culturalised description of consumption and its shorthand designation, ‘lifestyle’? This polemical paper interrogates both the linguistic and conceptual challenges associated with the term, and argues that it acts to efface and erase important social differences of wealth, opportunity, class, gender and ethnicity, as well as obscuring global and historical inequalities