The pathos of monopoly

[imomus]

Yesterday Hisae and I went to the Hamburger Bahnhof and saw a rather wonderful photography show, Typologies of Industrial Buildings by Bernd and Hilla Becher. (Click here for a better view.) "The exhibition presents blast furnaces, winding towers, water towers, cooling towers, gas tanks and coal bunkers in all their diversity," said the catalogue. Of course I'd seen the Bechers' work before, but never so much of it in one place, arranged so schematically in "typologies" (grids of 12 or 15 pictures showing variants on the same industrial building type). Room after room of the stuff.

These austere photos contain some lovely contradictions. On the one hand they're photographed with frigid detachment and icy objectivity, on the other hand you can't help entertaining intense personal fantasies of living in them, or opening clubs, lofts or museums there (the Hamburger Bahnhof itself is a repurposed industrial space, formerly housing the main Berlin-Hamburg railway line). The buildings are freakishly different from the kind of structures we see on our daily paths through cities, yet, arranged typologically, they draw our attention to their conformities, making us focus on small variations between different examples (always photographed against a flat grey sky).

Thinking about yesterday's entry about diversicide and monopoly, I began to scribble down notes. "The pathos of monopoly", read the first one. These buildings, once proud cathedrals of industrial might, are now frail and ghostly, remnants of a bygone era. Many have already been demolished, and are preserved only in these photographs (and the memories of the generations of workers who toiled there, making ceramics and paint, mining coal, smelting iron, bolting steel...) I imagined myself in frock coats, a hundred years ago, pointing to the structures and blaming them for erasing diversity (displacing villages, flattening forests, scarring the landscape). And yet here they are now, in these photographs, arranged in typologies of structural strangeness, advertising diversity. It's ironic.

I thought of a John Harris article in the Guardian I quoted with approval last year. "In 2004, there are but a handful of international musical superstars," it lamented, "Beyoncé, 50 Cent, Justin Timberlake, Eminem, Norah Jones, Coldplay." Already that list reeks of "the pathos of monopoly". Some of these artists are struggling to maintain their dominance. It's not that monoculture doesn't exist, it's that it's never quite clear which culture gets to play in mono, and for how long. Even Microsoft's massive dominance is by no means guaranteed. Five years, in the computing world, is time enough for the Roman Empire to decline and fall.

The dominant and the diverse, the one and the many, the "it" and the "others", these can all change places at the drop of a hat — that's the message the Becher pictures seemed to convey. They also prompted the thought that these relationships don't just change over time, they change according to the way you type, group and classify the relationships between things. Diversity can be present or absent depending on how close you get to the thing you're studying. For instance, jeans might all look the same from a certain distance, but get closer and you begin to see all sorts of distinguishing features (stitching, cut, texture and colour, weight, style allusion) — features which can have big meanings vested in them, like the difference between one class affiliation and another. You can zoom and crop the picture so that similarity fills the frame, or so that difference does. Uniformity just forces the play of difference down to ever-smaller and more subtle details; the kind of tricks I used to play when I customised my school uniform, wearing the V-neck backwards or fattening the tie. Little details took on a lot of importance, became the symbolic repositories of all individuality, all diversity.

It's always difficult to say exactly what people and things represent monoculture this year, and for how long they'll be doing it. Traditional Korean court music may seem like "diversity" when it's performed in today's Germany, but once, back home, it may well have been a dominant, erasing monoculture. The bully out of context is free to pose as a victim. Sure, monoculture does exist, but when it comes to specifying it all we can say is that we know it when we see it.

Comments

[georgesdelatour.livejournal.com]

Have you read Mark Ravenhill's article in today's Guardian about his "culture diet"?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,1573403,00.html

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Interesting, although it's slightly tragic that he's only set himself the challenge of avoiding American culture for one month. Some of us make this a permanent thing. As Ravenhill says, it's not that American culture is inherently bad, it's that it's dominant.

Jacques Attali once put it like this: "The tragedy of Britain is that it shares a language with one of the most creative nations the world has ever known." Attali was comparing the cultural life of London and Paris on the Late Show. He thought that London had a better musical life, but that its cinema, television etc were fatally undermined by the Atlanticist monocultural flow.

It's perfectly true that Paris has a much better range of world cinema and world music than anywhere in the US or the UK. USUK cultural products are distinctly provincial, unaware of, or indifferent to, other ways of being, other cultures. I watch Arte, and every day there are documentaries about non-Western peoples, or Cuba, Borneo, China, Mongolia, whatever. If I zap to the BBC, all I get is ticker tapes about the London and New York stock exchanges, as if ultimate reality were contained in those evanescent figures. And my memory of US TV is that it's all about the commercials, the charismatic anchor, and the weather. It's not that it's "evil", more that it's super-provincial. The system seems set up to filter out other people's perspectives.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I'd add that American culture hasn't always felt provincial. Once it felt like the centre of the world, even when it was just giving us endless Westerns, men on horses riding through a lawless dustbowl. If I picture my grandfather (my mother's father, a tennis champion and francophile) I think of him in later life sitting watching Westerns on a colour TV. And I think that culture, in which those particular provinces felt like the centre of the world, is now showing "the pathos of monopoly". America now looks local, not universal. Because of China's rise, partly. Do we see "universal modern cities" when we look at American cities now? I don't think so. They lack the dynamism and ambition and modernity of Shanghai. They aren't beckoning to the whole world the way they might have been in 1950. If I look at buildings in America that look like the future, they're made by foreigners (Rem Koolhaas' Seattle library, Sejima and Nishizawa's New Museum on the Bowery (http://www.newmuseum.org/now_new_initiatives.php)). The values transmitted in American film and TV no longer seem to contain universal messages that can help us all, wherever we are, to navigate "the American age". That age is over. The empire is now just another place.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

(Note to self: so is it dominant, or over? Answer: it's dominant and over.)