Madrid generics

[imomus]

One of the things I tend to photograph when I'm out and about are generics, patterns, display systems which categorize things. It's fascinating to see the way people display a lexis or set of objects, a group of repeating yet varying shapes. I especially like it when somewhat bloopy, organic shapes are squeezed into a gridlike structure and displayed face-on, behind glass, framed in the "naive order" of a rectangle, classified for convenience or for sale.



In Madrid this weekend I kept seeing -- and photographing -- simple head-on display, storage and classification systems. Or just patterns, sometimes related to the patterns of Islamic tile design, sometimes not. Shops tended to present their goods simply, in windows and counters, squeezing raw produce up against the flat plane of a glass pane in categorized and labelled squares. A tapas bar specializing in mushroom dishes displayed a poster of species, the outlandish shapes and colours tamed by a grid and Latin genus names. A store blind sported a leaf motif, an arts centre sorted its amenities using simple graphic design, a hardware depository ranked screws and nails rather in the same way a new social housing block ranged the urban poor.

In the Sunday market I discovered a wonderful wagon specialized in plastic tubes and rubber bands -- I've never seen so many rubber bands, or such huge ones -- while a vegetable market hung phallic gourds from hooks. A poster for an MC Escher exhibition was unexpectedly matched by an apartment building decorated with an Escher pattern. Juxtaposed with the polygons of an architectural poster, donuts became architectural too.

The thrill of generics isn't just in the generous presentation of consumer choices these displays present; there's also a delicious tension between the quiddity of the stubbornly unique single object and its capitulation to the order of the group, the grid, the genus. So it isn't too much of a stretch to say that my interest in generics relates to my interest in collectivism, sociology, anthropology and our ability to generalize about groups. The generic grid makes the pathos of individuality very clear. We're all different, but our differences all fit safely into pre-existing classifications, grids of description. That's the beauty -- and the tragedy -- of generics.

Comments

[lilredbite.livejournal.com]

You're in spain now!

Isn't that the Andalusian tile motive [behind you in the photo]

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I was in Madrid over the weekend, now I'm back in Berlin.

[petit-paradis.livejournal.com]

whats that around your neck?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

It's a sort of saddlebag I found in a military supplies shop. It fits over your neck, with two identical bags hanging down the front and back. I have become my own donkey, if by "donkey" we mean "a generic beast of burden fitted with saddlebags". (I apologize to any donkeys reading -- there's so much more to you than that, I know.)

[auto-nalle.livejournal.com]

it is very lovely.

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

Well, I suppose saddlebags were inevitable at your age...

[(Anonymous)]

At least he wears his clothes and not vice versa.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Anonymous Whimsy-sniping! I suppose it was inevitable once he sold his life story to Hollywood for gazillions of dollars.

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

Clearly I've arrived. But you have it wrong, Nick: I'm laughing all the way to the hamper these days, as I'm being paid in loud socks. Veritable saddlebags of 'em. Mind if I borrow yours?

[hook-and-eyelet.livejournal.com]

I think your photographs would be great postcards, as corny as it sounds. You have an amazing eye, not to mention clogs.

it's not just the eye for image

[zzberlin.livejournal.com]

Clearly Momus can frame a provocative image. But there is also the juxta-positioning of the images in a collage. Which image flatters the next? It reminds me of musical mashups a bit.

Momus, I would not have sequenced these images as you have because I want to flow images based on color, and you flow them on something I haven't quite put my finger on.

gimme gimme gimme

[zzberlin.livejournal.com]

Give me links to those individual images and let me put them in the order that suits me and let's see what people say. RIGHT NOW> oof sorry when I get demanding it means I need to check my meds, hee.

[ulyart.livejournal.com]

These are great photos. I have always been fascinated by the Japanese bento. As a kid in Taiwan I often took a five-hour train ride from Taipei to Chiayi, to see my grandparents, and when the train stopped at stations along the way, hawkers sold these boxed lunches through the windows.

To have the entire experience of a meal-- the table, bowls, dishes and utensiles-- packed into a single box, delighted me. Marcel Duchamp must have felt a similar delight when he made his portable museum-in-a-box (http://members.aol.com/mindwebart3/marcelpg3.htm) which inspires, let's admit it, feelings we might also get from contemplating an elaborate dollhouse (http://www.nsrider.com/gallerymain/England/dollhouse.htm).

When I started to learn to read, I saw that kanji also were composed of distinct semantic radicals tidily packed into a square. I've read elsewhere (I forget where) that the Japanese genius for packing electronics into portable packages is just the latest manifestation of a ongoing obsession with packing in general.

Predefined grids, like the squares of a chess board, open up a space where the mind can play.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Yes, those are great examples, and I think one is aware in Japan that the rectangle, the grid, has an even more important status than it does in the West. (Though certainly the Swiss, Germans and Dutch love it in a similar way: Mondrian, Albers, Muller-Brockmann et al.)

I think cosplay also shows a delight in generics. Things, in Japan, are reassuring and beautiful to the extent that they fit extant categories. This is sometimes passed off as a lack of interest in originality or individuality, but it's something much more positive, I think, something to do with the way difference and similarity subtly interplay and enhance one another.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

the Swiss, Germans and Dutch love it in a similar way: Mondrian, Albers, Muller-Brockmann et al.

It's interesting to contrast a typically American artist like Jackson Pollock. Here we see the pathos of individuality -- pure spatter, pure unconstrained gesture, an empty demonstration of freedom from confinement for its own sake, self-assertion for its own sake.

Imagine each Jackson Pollock drip classified and put in a box with similar ones, and the canvas carefully divided into rectangles displaying "types of drip". That would be quite a different kind of artist who made that, ne, and quite a different idea of beauty and the self... It would be a bit like Diderot and Rousseau collaborating on a project, or the Enlightenment putting an encyclopaedic grid around Romanticism.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

(Of course, the edge of the canvas, and the white cube of the gallery, makes the "grid" in Pollock's work, as you see when you walk into a room full of them. So we're really just discussing whether an artist should include both Diderot and Rousseau, or whether he should let the gallery be his encyclopedist, his grid.)

[stanleylieber.livejournal.com]

http://www.physics.hku.hk/~tboyce/ap/topics/pollock.html

[ulyart.livejournal.com]

the pathos of individuality -- pure spatter, pure unconstrained gesture

This reminds me of the Zen calligrapher whose goal is-- given the formal constraints of black ink, white paper, and a text-- nevertheless to express the wildest freedom.

Zen embraces both the rigorous right angles of tatami and shoji, and the misshapen, lumpy wabi-sabi clay vessels of the tea ceremony.

Order is deeply reassuring, but once we've established order, we long for surprise, for life.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Yes, of course it's about the delicious interplay between them. Like me trying endlessly to tame my essentially untameable rabbit. I both do and don't want to succeed.

[akabe.livejournal.com]

which is similar to kojin karitani's thesis in 'Architecture as Metaphor' (basically taken from wittgenstein) where the only salvation from totalitarian , architectural, metaphisical thought is the inevitable presence of the other who doesn't understand my language, a foreigner, a child , a rabbit.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I have that book... in a box somewhere! Or should I say, a grid?

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

I see no pathos in Pollock. I see forest brambles, kelp in tidal pools, nature. (http://www.physics.hku.hk/~tboyce/ap/topics/pollock.html) How much one enjoys Pollock might depend on if one prefers totems or specimens, or an ambiguous mix of the two.

Sol LeWitt is a "typically American artist" too. So was Sol LeWitt, the grid king himself. Never liked his work--too uninviting, arid. Prefer the alternate, somewhat porous take on the grid by another American, Richard Diebenkorn:



I think it's important that grids themselves are provisional, and will break down upon closer inspection, like Rube Goldberg devices. Gotta keep that one flaw in there--a backwards knot in the Persian carpet, as it were. Too hermetic and sterile, otherwise. Diebenkorn might have agreed.

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

Of course, your interest in the museum aesthetic plays into this idea of organic elements within a grid as well. It also applies to dandyism, insofar as it is a living being existing within a grid of its own making, like a mollusk growing a shell...the creature grows, expanding its container until at last it dies, leaving a hardened empty husk behind. At that point, it loses its immediate organic relationships. It can be borrowed, but never again embodied. Eventually, they are fossilized or broken. Archetypes seem to follow along these lines, too.

[(Anonymous)]

In art as in so much else freedom from confinement for it's own sake sucks, what we need is more confinement for it's own sake.
Pollack.... yeah as American as apple pie,a real son o' Uncle Sam he was.
When would you imagine will this constant rubbishing of 'typically American' culture qualify as being the xenophobia it is?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

America -- a universal principle, not a country -- can take it.

[(Anonymous)]

But America is also embodies a culture. If your readers chose to disparage typically Japanese cultural phenomena, would you consider that to be questioning a principle or just cultural xenophobia.

agreed

[zzberlin.livejournal.com]

<< America -- a universal principle, not a country -- can take it >>

As a USA citizen, I agree with Momus here. The US can take some rubbishment, it needs it. I don't see M's perspective as xenophobic, I see it as a aristocratic, patronizing, and mocking.

[(Anonymous)]

Nothing makes me think "Spain" like MC Escher posters, ugly modern Lego buildings and pictures of frosted donuts!

[alvaroceb.livejournal.com]

A quite elegant way of answering the critics of latest posts!

[charleshatcher.livejournal.com]

Yes, it's like someone writing something vacuous and insensate with a most beautiful penmanship. Seemingly, all of Momus' recent posts can be boiled down to "Japan good; America bad." Or perhaps the former part of that is implied.

Again, because Momus/Girly Garl believes that "collectivism" is better that individualism, he attempts to inform us of its objective superiority, in the same way that he tries to imply that delicate, Nipponese nymphets are, without doubt, God's greatest creation so far, which is silly, really, when it's so patently clear that tall, dark men with broken noses are.

[desant012.livejournal.com]

I work for a Japanese corporation in the US - they're as ethnocentric and egocentric as any American. My job exists to keep the Japanese from wagging their dicks into the American market, and trust me, I'm kept pretty busy.

Whatever illusions Momus has of the gentle, "for the greater good" Japanese, I personally have no idea where he got that from. They can be as stubborn and pigheaded as any other culture out there. Which is to say, they're human beings.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

They can be as stubborn and pigheaded as any other culture out there. Which is to say, they're human beings.

My dear Desant012, thank you. This is a lovely specimen to add to my collection of Procrustean Seeing (http://imomus.livejournal.com/194903.html). It's also a fine example of the American discomfort with the concept of group difference and its sublimation to the level of "everyone in the world". Thank heaven you didn't say, for instance, "The Japanese, in my experience, can be up to 67.5% as stubborn as the Chinese," for instance. That would have to have been disqualified.

[desant012.livejournal.com]

It's not really "sublimation of group difference" - the Japanese over in Osaka I work with feel the Japanese way is better than the American way, so I secretly have to change everything they want to publish in the US. If I didn't everything would look like manga - no matter what we say, they feel the Japanese way is the only way things can be done. It's downright ... brash and American!

I'm just saying, it's the general human condition to be ethno and egocentric. It's part of humanity at large - it's built into the very code of our genes, not matter how Confucian a society is.

An outward appearance can be as dignified, polite, and calm as possible, but can it be trusted as a signal of the state within? can it??!!

without the wig

[zzberlin.livejournal.com]

<< the Japanese over in Osaka I work with feel the Japanese way is better than the American way >>

And don't we all feel that our own way is better than anyone else's? That is why we do it this way, as misguided as we may be.

The way that is the USA

[zzberlin.livejournal.com]

And what is the "American way" ?

The word freedom gets said a lot.

"Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

Life: but Americans execute people on the chopping block.

Liberty: How can Americans promise anyone liberty when they execute people on a chopping block?

The pursuit of happiness: How smug and self-important to think that anyone could ever promise anyone the pursuit of happiness.

There you have it. The promises in the DI are absurd. The values we hold cannot be collectivized.

The American way is bullying, self-absorbed, materialistic, and technologically more sophisticated than any place else in the world. Till China takes over with stem cell research.

[(Anonymous)]

Dear Momus,

Why the sarcasm? How is Desant012's comment different from your grid -- each stubborn and pigheaded culture in its own box, but a bit differently stubborn and pigheaded in its own way?

These days reading these comments feels like watching your readers try to debate with a wall. Though it might be expected from someone with a graying beard (what they say about changing long-held opinions), I'm disappointed by your unwillingness to deign any dissenting/American opinion with a serious response.

And why yes, you would be disqualified to say the Japanese are less stubborn than the Chinese. They seem to be rivals in that department in their region, with their respective ethnocentrism varying according to how much power they wield at the time. The British and other Europeans also had their turn at imperialism; now the Americans get to play. This doesn't make all of them the same, but we do have the same term for it, the same grid, you might even call it.

FC

[alvaroceb.livejournal.com]

«We're all different, but our differences all fit safely into pre-existing classifications, grids of description». The more I think about it, the more I find it totally right: the fact is that national identities pre-exist us, that means, they are historical (and thus essentially non-essential). They can be actualized or rejected, inside or ouside the concerned nation. But I don't think that one can cath a glimpse of them in a more or less short trip.

[cheapsurrealist.livejournal.com]

[cheapsurrealist.livejournal.com]

depende de su “Mirador”

[grzeg.livejournal.com]

Actually, that apartment (http://www.people.cornell.edu/pages/gks26/works/mirador01.htm), regardless of being built to house the growing working class of Sanchinarro, Madrid, takes in all of the region’s pre-classified-yet-different social “typologies” (as the architects would say), and systematically organizes them to their particular fitting in the grid of descriptions:

“The 156 apartments are divided among nine smaller blocks, each containing a particular unit size to accommodate the heterogeneous typologies and inhabitant situations, yet integrating all of the diverse social groupings within one building.”

I guess having a continuous circulation (the orange) (or living in the same building) purports a sort-of socially-binding collectivism, but, the apartment as a whole still provides for the expression of the particular Western notion of the categorical individual…

[phulan-devi.livejournal.com]

Hello!!

I was in your show in Madrid last Saturday. It was great, I had a very good time, it was like being in a cabaret for a few minutes, and I always wanted to be in a cabaret, thank you so much U_U But the people there were so boring, just drinking and staring like zombies *_* Thank you for the Kahimi's songs too, I like her so much!!

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Thank you Phulan. It's a pity you didn't come up to the balcony -- I was sitting there with Kahimi Karie, my girlfriend, receiving visitors and signing autographs.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I'm just teasing you about my girlfriend being Kahimi, actually she's Hisae. Anyway, I enjoyed your account of the show. Here's another one (http://tremolina.blogia.com/2006/121802-4-grupos-por-el-precio-de-5.php), which tells us that "the whole Estubo scene" was in the audience:

“That is Teresa Single, that Tito Penélope, There this Victor Malsonando, the one of the hood is a Superjudge, to their side the critic of the RDL, the one of the camera she is Helena Cabrera… “and thus until the infinite."

Daaahling!

Oh, and YouTube videos (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APen-GSIy4E) are now up.

oh man!

[zzberlin.livejournal.com]

Momus, why'dya post those images as one big image? It makes it impossible to single out and cite individual images. I love the pink buildings, would like to include the specific image I mean here, but can't because it's just all one big collage.

emerge

[(Anonymous)]

I'm a graphic designer in San Francisco. I read our blog regularly (you're a friend of my friend's). I realize I need and crave for the connection and activity you write about and experience. How do you reach out and how can I emerge myself more with art & design?

-val

Re: emerge

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Go to a pecha kucha night (http://www.pecha-kucha.org/)!

rectangles

[(Anonymous)]

i've got a great organic shape framed in a rectangle for you
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjoZmx_dV0c

Click me baby one more time!

[(Anonymous)]

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