Secondhand best: the point of not designing at all

[imomus]

About ten years ago -- in the trendy "iMac cybercafés" of London, anyway -- you couldn't escape Tom Dixon's floor lamp, the Jack Lamp. It was part of a wave of neo-organic -- yet very slick and finished -- neo-lounge design sweeping Western Europe. While Dixon was doing it with lamps, Future Systems were doing the same in architecture, Droog Design or Ron Arad in furniture. Klein Dytham did it, and Jon Ives turned Apple around with it. The Swiss Re skyscraper, and a similar one in Barcelona, brought the look belatedly to city skylines. For a few years everything in my house was a lozenge, a blob, a spore, a pod. It made you think of designer drugs, or Kubrick's 2001, or computer-modelled DNA helixes. It was so 21st century!



But actually, it wasn't. It was what the 20th century thought the 21st century would be like. In fact, post-9/11, amidst apocalyptic global warming warnings and pre-resource wars, a different set of concerns are defining what things look like. Words like "sustainability" and "ethics" pop up again and again. Tom Dixon himself, now creative director at Finnish design company Artek, told Tyler Brule at the Salon del Mobile in Milan recently:

"One of the themes that's running through the stuff that we're doing is -- I dunno, that overused word of "sustainability", really. The way we're tackling it is by even going to the point of not designing at all. So buying back all of the old Artek furniture from the last 70 years. Trying to go to schools and hospitals and buying up or swapping or exchanging furniture so that we build up some of the Artek furniture in our stock that's got some patina and some history. I think that what's quite nice about the Artek furniture is that it grows old gracefully. My favourite Artek is a twenty or thirty year old Artek."

As a result, the Artek pavilion in Milan, designed in papier maché and cardboard by Shigeru Ban, showcased old Artek stools the company had bought back. The more shitty and degraded these stools were, the better. As the 2nd Cycle page of their website explains:

"This was a brand new stool sometime in the 30s. It only just found its way back to Artek, when one of our own Korhonen craftsmen brought it home. Where it's been in the past 70 years, we can only guess by reading tiny clues, like the green paint subtly appearing through the chipped coat of red... Some might think that this stool looks old and dodgy. We think it's never looked more beautiful."



"The dents, the scratches and the patina tell their never-ending story," continues the Artek website, gushingly underscoring a parallel between their own "timeless" furniture and Picasso paintings. (Art, of course, accumulates value as it ages, unlike trash like cars and computers.)

Now, you don't need to sell the idea of patina to me. No invocations of wabi sabi necessary; I'm totally on board this shabby juggernaut already. My whole world is defined by dirt, wear and tear, recycling, imperfection and impermanence.

At a barbecue in Gorlitzer Park last weekend I got talking to an Israeli girl about generation gaps which are also class gaps. Our parents think they're higher class than we are because they have newer furniture, clothes and so on. What they don't realize is that we think we're higher class than them because we've moved past consumerism as the be-all and end-all of life. We wear our secondhand clothes -- and present our retro furniture -- as a badge of honour, a cache of cultural capital. You don't spend your way to a better future when spending is precisely what's going to cancel the future!

In Berlin, at least, the style of the progressive bourgeois class is totally defined by patina. Most cafes for these people have mix-and-match retro chairs, shabby and comfy. People's houses have 50s, 60s and 70s furniture, often communist ostalgie pieces, each one with a tale to tell. The less you paid, the cleverer you are.

In Berlin, at least, this is essential class signalling. What distinguishes a cool cafe from McDonald's, or a cool house from a house furnished by Ikea, is patina. Busy working people often admire your handpicked thrift clothes apologetically: "I'd love to wear that kind of stuff, but I just don't have the time to hunt it down, so I just buy new." New has become second-best, secondhand best. It may be hard to explain to your parents, but to your peers it's second nature.

After seeing the beautifully peely-wally Berlin Biennial last summer (a zeitgeisty barometer of a show, organised mostly by Maurizio Cattelan) I went flathunting in Neukolln (where I now live), "the only area where I could find decor shabby enough to satisfy my craving for patina, which is, finally, character, personality, history, texture". I also wrote a bunch of stuff about how globe-trotting immigrants and creative class post-materialists share tastes as well as neighbourhoods.



Of course it all gets very complex and contradictory. The creative class in Neukolln are slumming Slow Lifers, whereas the immigrants are on the up-and-up, enterprising, hard-working, stressed. One group is pre-materialist (in other words, aspirational and ambitious), the other post-materialist (so over Rolexes and bling). They pass each other midway without so much as a nod.

There's also a fascinating paradox in the attitude to work -- the dignity of labour -- that emerges in the patina aesthetic. Sure, old stuff is cool because you can see how it's been worked and reworked. You enjoy -- and fetishize -- labour in the piece. Other people's labour. People you never met, people far away in space and in time. Dead craftsmen, previous owners. Yet you opt out of consumerism, and buy pre-owned stuff, as part of opting out of precisely the kind of productive culture that created this stuff in the first place. You admire, from your Slow Life, the "fast life" of someone overworked, back in 1920, or over in China.

This is a sort of commodity fetishism by proxy. It can veer close to sexual fetishism. My new article for AIGA Voice is called Confessions of a Magazine Pervert, and it looks at all the glossy coffeetable books that have appeared recently to celebrate old magazines. "Sniff these books," I lamented pervily, "and you’ll get a big whiff of expensive new printer’s ink rather than the vinegary sea-smell of vintage paper. But in other respects they’re as good as a trip to Dorama."

Dorama is a Tokyo secondhand mag store. But I could as easily have talked about Cow Books, or the aesthetic of ku:nel magazine.

Let's go back to Tom Dixon's Artek pavilion, basically a trade show filled with old stuff rather than new. "Going to the point of not designing at all," Dixon calls it. Not-designing is the new designing! Not-consuming is the new consuming! I buy it!

No, I really buy it. Some of the great actions of our time have been non-actions. Think of Duchamp giving up art for chess. Think of Cage letting nature, or the fall of the dice, determine his compositions. Think of Eno "producing" U2 by telling them to take a holiday. (If only they'd made that two weeks permanent, Bono could have saved us from global warming by now!)

Yes, doing nothing really is doing something, and something good. If only Bush had done nothing after 9/11! Seriously, the world would be a better place now.

And what about Sarkozy? His big idea -- the one that got him elected, we're told -- is that people in France should do more, and earn more. His subtext: if we work harder, we won't be supplanted by immigrants at home, or the Chinese abroad. In other words, here's the right wing opposite of the left wing creative class solidarity with immigrants. Instead of Slow Lifing down to immigrant levels of income (if not immigrant levels of work), Sarkozy wants the average French person to be more like an immigrant -- and, as a result, banish actual foreigners -- or their imports -- from France. Don't you see? I want to live with them, but not be like them. Sarko wants me to be like them, but not live with them.



A Guardian article called Goodbye to la belle France? sees Stuart Jeffries hoping -- as I do -- that Sarkozy's Anglo-Saxonization of France is a sham and will fail. France lives a slow life, with short working hours, good longevity levels, high benefits, and great quality of life. Why on earth would trading this for the lifestyle of overweight, overworked, overstressed, increasingly classed, quick-fry, quick-die, win-or-lose Americans and Britons be any sort of advance?

The fact is, the quicker you achieve bling culture, the quicker you're going to abandon it, come out the other side. Over the peak, down the slope, back to sanity. We see it when celebs like Madonna make their inevitable "fame and money doesn't make you happy" albums, and we see it in all the post-protestant cultures (Holland, Finland, Germany) currently embracing post-materialist values. Ronald Inglehart nailed it in his book Culture Shift in Advanced Industrial Society:

"Inglehart's thesis, restated repeatedly throughout the book, is that a gradual but steady and profound shift has been occurring in the basic values of the mass publics of the more advanced industrial societies. The shift is away from the long predominant preoccupation with material well-being and physical security and toward greater concern for the quality of life, more self-expression, greater sexual freedom, and interpersonal relations that are less formal."

It's already happening in China, where the surprise bestseller is a modern adaptation of the philosophy of Confucius by Yu Dan. Her book has sold three million copies in four months. It's happened, thinks the Seattle Times, because Confucius can supply the necessary moral backbone and a set of benevolent values to offset "the dark side of the economic miracle that has led to a dangerous rich-poor divide, rampant corruption and rising social unrest".

"Just because you have a successful career does not necessarily mean you have made your dreams come true," writes Yu Dan. She tells the story of three field mice preparing for winter. "One gathered food, one built shelter and the third did nothing but play. Winter came and there was plenty to eat but nothing to do inside the hideaway. That was when the third mouse made himself valuable by telling stories from his days of fun and games."

A surprise ending? Not really.

Comments

Re: seeding power to the govern MEANT?

[obliterati.livejournal.com]

You have got to be the stupidest stalker I have ever had. I mean seriously.

Re: You can never tell when Gura and the drama llama "ANTics" will turnip "Touching You"?

[oscar-wilde.livejournal.com]

there is nothing as inSINcere as a "sarcASStic" complimeant?

The latest on ToXiC PoP has all the art stars CONvinced "we" are CONspiring together BTW! (http://community.livejournal.com/deathtripping/8553.html?replyto=85865)

Re: You can never tell when Gura and the drama llama "ANTics" will turnip "Touching You"?

[obliterati.livejournal.com]

I don't know you, I never knew you, I never cared to know you, and your lack of style is surpassed only by your lack of entertainment value.

Stalking is boring, child. Bo-ring.