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Meanwhile, back in the real world...
The last couple of days in Boston provided a nice study in the kind of contrasts that exist in high-Gini America, but also between the world of design commentary and the actual world people live in. I arrived at the Boston ICA after a pleasant train trip up from New York. It's a very Japanese-looking structure which sits on the waterfront beyond a wilderness of carparks in the conference centre district, a sort of translucent plastic Muji jewelbox of culture. The riverside area is particularly dramatic, eddying with breezes, a spacious patio of floor- and ceiling-decking with a rakish glass crow's nest of a multimedia centre suspended from the ceiling. The Japanese impression continues in the lobby, where there's currently a vast wallpaper piece by Chiho Aoshima on display. It shows a naked cutey (weeping eco-themed tears) jutting her rump into the air and farting. The title is "The Divine Gas".
My presentation took place in the galleries. With staff wheeling a karaoke trolley around, and an audience of about 40 (more had to be turned away for lack of space) following me from exhibit to exhibit, I did ten-minute presentations about five items I'd selected from the Design Life Now exhibition. The whole thing was co-ordinated by Lizzi Ross, the ICA's Adult Program Manager, and an ex-Edinburgher like myself. The design pieces I chose were Vito Acconci's architecture (basically repeating my Vito Spreads Seed blog piece about this brilliant, ahem, jack-off of all trades), Apple's iPods (a chance for me to show off my new iPod Touch and rave about having the power of Google in my pocket), the oriental orientalism of Han Feng's costume design for Madame Butterfly, Deborah Adler's redesigned prescription drug pillboxes (which allowed me to riff on Saussure and whether "rational" design can ever communicate better than design we're habituated to) and Architecture for Humanity's African AIDS centres (a chance to talk about Lacaton and Vassal's African-inspired architecture and Shigeru Ban's Kobe earthquake relief huts, and speculate on whether cheap and ethical design mightn't also have its own aesthetic elegance).
The next day was spent wandering about in Boston, where real world design issues imposed themselves, first of all gently, then in a dramatic emergency. A student at the ICA had recommended a trip to Thayer Street in SoWa (South of Washington Street, Boston's newest gallery district), so I dutifully trekked out there only to find a couple of big brick warehouse buildings stuffed with really twee painters' studios which seemed to confirm that the really ambitious painters had all moved to New York. There was an elegant secondhand shop, though, Bobby from Boston, and a truly world-standard rare art books shop, Ars Libri, with zig-zaggy wooden shelves under a wooden ceiling and just the most amazing rarities. I could've spent most of the day poring over the old catalogues in there.
But the world beckoned in the form of a ramble over Beacon Hill, the charming-but-snobby Georgian brick quarter. You immediately know who's a tourist and who's a resident there; residents have loud voices and a strong sense of entitlement. They have "Boston Irish" faces, but they're Irish-made-good; people who look like they should be called "Lady Colleen" push prams or walk ornamental dogs. Pampered kids are ferried to and from school in Volvos. The wifi networks are all passworded; trust the rich to be mean with stuff like that.
After a trip across the common and a walk down chi-chi Newbury Street it's out to the Harvard campus, where a braying sense of entitlement also prevails; strange fresher's week rituals are happening on the lawns, as post-jock students pile on top of each other, making human pyramids. "These goons will probably be president of the US one day," I muse, "one after the other". There is, though, a great contemporary art centre (vastly superior to the sad, twee galleries in the supposedly-"gritty" SoWa district) in the form of the Carpenter Center, which is showing an exhibition I find completely fascinating: Amie Siegel's Berlin Remake, a split-screen installation showing scenes from communist-era films of East Berlin, paralleled by Amie's meticulously-matched films of the same scenes as they look today. It's a testimony to the extreme transformations Berlin has seen in just the last twenty years or so, and it's totally weird to walk out of it onto the Harvard campus (it's safe to say that the jock students wouldn't come near this show -- its curatorial quality is icing on the cake of their super-privileged college years).
I've given myself 40 minutes to make the New York train at South Station, but something unexpected happens: there's a fire at Park Street and our train is stranded on the bridge over the Charles River with no power for thirty minutes. People start to freak out in the airless carriage -- a woman next to me claims to be having an asthmatic attack. Central control isn't responding to the guard's pleas for information, so eventually she throws the doors open and we all jump out of the train (climbing over a spiked fence but not the live rail) and cross the bridge back into town on foot. The city swarms and screams with police and fire sirens. Helicopters hover overhead. You can't help thinking of 9/11 at times like this, especially if it happened on your doorstep.
I've missed my train, and the holiday weekend means there are no seats on later New York trains. I head to the bus depot and buy a ticket for the Fung Wah Chinatown bus. I'm told that my ticket is valid for the 8.30 bus, but when I get back (after a great vegetarian meal at a place called Buddha's Delight in Chinatown) there is no 8.30 bus. There's just a big queue, too big for the 9pm bus when it arrives. Eventually I make it onto a bus that leaves at 9.40, driven by a manic man-mountain who treats the freeway like a race track. It's seat-of-the-pants stuff; a chaotic, basic and bumpy end to a trip that started absurdly highfalutin and utopian. I reach New York at 2.30am just glad to be alive. I'd like to nominate this nightmarishly fast $15 bus ride my "most memorable design object of the week" and commend its designer, Fung Wah, for the thought-provoking brutality of her invention. Truly a wake-up call for sleepy aesthetes with their heads in clouds of "divine gas"!
My presentation took place in the galleries. With staff wheeling a karaoke trolley around, and an audience of about 40 (more had to be turned away for lack of space) following me from exhibit to exhibit, I did ten-minute presentations about five items I'd selected from the Design Life Now exhibition. The whole thing was co-ordinated by Lizzi Ross, the ICA's Adult Program Manager, and an ex-Edinburgher like myself. The design pieces I chose were Vito Acconci's architecture (basically repeating my Vito Spreads Seed blog piece about this brilliant, ahem, jack-off of all trades), Apple's iPods (a chance for me to show off my new iPod Touch and rave about having the power of Google in my pocket), the oriental orientalism of Han Feng's costume design for Madame Butterfly, Deborah Adler's redesigned prescription drug pillboxes (which allowed me to riff on Saussure and whether "rational" design can ever communicate better than design we're habituated to) and Architecture for Humanity's African AIDS centres (a chance to talk about Lacaton and Vassal's African-inspired architecture and Shigeru Ban's Kobe earthquake relief huts, and speculate on whether cheap and ethical design mightn't also have its own aesthetic elegance).
The next day was spent wandering about in Boston, where real world design issues imposed themselves, first of all gently, then in a dramatic emergency. A student at the ICA had recommended a trip to Thayer Street in SoWa (South of Washington Street, Boston's newest gallery district), so I dutifully trekked out there only to find a couple of big brick warehouse buildings stuffed with really twee painters' studios which seemed to confirm that the really ambitious painters had all moved to New York. There was an elegant secondhand shop, though, Bobby from Boston, and a truly world-standard rare art books shop, Ars Libri, with zig-zaggy wooden shelves under a wooden ceiling and just the most amazing rarities. I could've spent most of the day poring over the old catalogues in there.
But the world beckoned in the form of a ramble over Beacon Hill, the charming-but-snobby Georgian brick quarter. You immediately know who's a tourist and who's a resident there; residents have loud voices and a strong sense of entitlement. They have "Boston Irish" faces, but they're Irish-made-good; people who look like they should be called "Lady Colleen" push prams or walk ornamental dogs. Pampered kids are ferried to and from school in Volvos. The wifi networks are all passworded; trust the rich to be mean with stuff like that.
After a trip across the common and a walk down chi-chi Newbury Street it's out to the Harvard campus, where a braying sense of entitlement also prevails; strange fresher's week rituals are happening on the lawns, as post-jock students pile on top of each other, making human pyramids. "These goons will probably be president of the US one day," I muse, "one after the other". There is, though, a great contemporary art centre (vastly superior to the sad, twee galleries in the supposedly-"gritty" SoWa district) in the form of the Carpenter Center, which is showing an exhibition I find completely fascinating: Amie Siegel's Berlin Remake, a split-screen installation showing scenes from communist-era films of East Berlin, paralleled by Amie's meticulously-matched films of the same scenes as they look today. It's a testimony to the extreme transformations Berlin has seen in just the last twenty years or so, and it's totally weird to walk out of it onto the Harvard campus (it's safe to say that the jock students wouldn't come near this show -- its curatorial quality is icing on the cake of their super-privileged college years).
I've given myself 40 minutes to make the New York train at South Station, but something unexpected happens: there's a fire at Park Street and our train is stranded on the bridge over the Charles River with no power for thirty minutes. People start to freak out in the airless carriage -- a woman next to me claims to be having an asthmatic attack. Central control isn't responding to the guard's pleas for information, so eventually she throws the doors open and we all jump out of the train (climbing over a spiked fence but not the live rail) and cross the bridge back into town on foot. The city swarms and screams with police and fire sirens. Helicopters hover overhead. You can't help thinking of 9/11 at times like this, especially if it happened on your doorstep.
I've missed my train, and the holiday weekend means there are no seats on later New York trains. I head to the bus depot and buy a ticket for the Fung Wah Chinatown bus. I'm told that my ticket is valid for the 8.30 bus, but when I get back (after a great vegetarian meal at a place called Buddha's Delight in Chinatown) there is no 8.30 bus. There's just a big queue, too big for the 9pm bus when it arrives. Eventually I make it onto a bus that leaves at 9.40, driven by a manic man-mountain who treats the freeway like a race track. It's seat-of-the-pants stuff; a chaotic, basic and bumpy end to a trip that started absurdly highfalutin and utopian. I reach New York at 2.30am just glad to be alive. I'd like to nominate this nightmarishly fast $15 bus ride my "most memorable design object of the week" and commend its designer, Fung Wah, for the thought-provoking brutality of her invention. Truly a wake-up call for sleepy aesthetes with their heads in clouds of "divine gas"!
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that must have been quite some fire at park street -- how scary. having lived in cambridge/somerville for 8 years meant i took the red line every single day.
thanks for the report; i left the city in late '04 and it's interesting to see how things have changed. the ICA's new building wasn't open yet -- in fact i think it was still in the planning stages. it used to be in a super-tiny space that could really only hold one small show at a time. other than that, there was pretty much zero modern art in boston -- though yes, the carpenter center is really good. hadn't heard of "SoWa" before either -- not a surprise to hear it's a bit disappointing. nothing boston does will ever shake the puritanical stuffiness out of its soul.
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There are artists hiding on the outskirts of Boston: Jamaica Plain, Somerville, Lowell. But you have to dig. alot. And the high fallutin' elite of Boston proper really don't have much sympathy or interest in contemporary art. The new ICA has an excellent opportunity to have an impact on that, although it will probably take alot of time before it noticeably shifts the attitude of the city. I also agree with your assessment of SoWa. They're trying too hard to make it into something that it just isn't and now never will be because most of the lofts are all luxury condos already.
It's been interesting living in London for the last 3 months. Even more affluent than Boston right now. And yet, supportive of more challenging art. (that's a really redux comment, obviously)
Good stuff on Wikipedia
(Anonymous) 2007-10-06 04:25 pm (UTC)(link)- Ian Grossman of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration reported that Fung Wah drivers rated in the worst 2 percent of drivers nationwide based on regulatory violations, and nine out of 71 Fung Wah drivers were suspended after inspection between 2004 and 2006.
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I don't like the situation of the ICA very much compared to the one in London. Very unfriendly towards pedestrians, and with a different more stratified vibe inside. At the London ICA I'd often have drinks in the lounge with the artists after their talks/performances. It felt like an adult, intimate arena. In Boston it is a very family-oriented cafeteria with uncomfortable seats which don't at all encourage groups speaking to each other. It feels so much more a place for tourists than a place for artists. That said, I have enjoyed the exhibitions so far, and especially appreciate the free evenings on Thursdays.
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I really enjoyed your commentary at the ica! Thanks again for letting my friend bob and I join you.
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entitlement prevails
Is there still an Italian restaurant at the top of Beacon Hill inhabited by students.
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Didn't you write a journal entry decrying the iPod for essentially creating an enviroment that mediocritises the pleasure of music?
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You're my hero for the day, Momus.
By the way, I'm surprised you havent made an entry related to the Burmese protests. I know you generally try to stay clear of politics in your journal but I think these protests are particularly interesting for the huge role the internet has played in things. It's been widely acknolwedged that without the internet this movement wouldn't have been possible. It's pretty exciting stuff.
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I meant specifically the people who were getting your goat that day. The jock-goon pyramid of future presidents... You should have gone over to speak to them.
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(Anonymous) 2007-10-07 01:03 pm (UTC)(link)no subject
I've found that whenever possible its best to be asleep on the Fung Wah before they get on the highway. That way you either wake up at your destination, or you simply don't wake up.
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