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imomusOn the coldest day of the winter so far, Hisae and I took refuge yesterday in the Ostbahnhof branch of "Profi-Baumarkte" Hellweg. The main draw was the pet shop, but I got pretty bored looking at the fluffy bunnies and drifted off to the power tools section.
Now, I'm an aesthete. For me, the forms of power tools primarily summon up some kind of mysterious otherness. I frame them in purely aesthetic terms -- I love the colours, the weird shapes, the rational insanity of them. I also throw cultural frames around them -- the coolest stuff at Hellweg is kit by Einhell, a German brand with a very German solidity and conservatism to its forms. (And yet isn't there something funky, almost Nu-Rave about it too? Remember Altern 8?)
Here, then (from Einhell, but also Silverline, Makita, Sealey) are wondrous strange garden spreaders, sawing tables, electric generators, compressors, lathes, submersible pumps, bench drills, stick electrodes, gas heating reflectors, abrasive cut off saws, welding tools, aprons and gloves in primary colours, air accessory kits with quick couplings, dust free systems, shortwave infrared paint dryers, suction feed paraffin spray guns, nitrile gauntlets for use with thinners, and all sorts of other wonderful things I'll never, ever use, but am happy to stand and gawk at -- the way you might gaze in wonder at technology from a vanished superpower (Soviet-era space equipment, for instance).
Call it a "consumerism of the uselessly functional". Call it an ostranenie operation carried out on consumer desire in general ("Lovely, but what would I do with all this kit?"). Call it a poignant tension between the useful and the useless, the macho and the gay, the rockist and the pop. You can't help thinking of putting this stuff in an art gallery, but of course Koons has already done it (with his fetishistically clean industrial vacuums).
You also can't help (well, if you're me, anyway) remembering the kerfuffle that occurred at the London Design Museum in September 2004, when vacuum cleaner innovator James Dyson resigned as chairman of the board of trustees, accusing the museum of promoting "empty styling" over "function-led, problem-solving design". There's a gender element, an element of pure machismo, in the story: the final straw for Dyson, apparently, was the museum's replacement of a display of inventions and functional design products with an exhibition on 1950s flower arranger Constance Spry.
As I pointed out when I wrote my article on design rockism for AIGA Voice, matters aren't always that simple:
"Post-protestants desire functionality in ways that go beyond the merely pragmatic, and stray into the areas of the ethical, the cultural, the aesthetic, the psychological, the irrational. Jerry Seinfeld has a sketch about how men go and just watch other men when they’re doing DIY, because they have a magnetic attraction to the machismo of tools. Sure, it looks functional, but it’s also an aesthetic attraction, an irrational impulse deep within a certain kind of man. The rockists in the Dyson affair are incensed that the Design Museum should stage a flower arrangement show, but they don’t consider that their own attachment to functionality may be just as subjective, as aesthetic and as irrational as any response to Constance Spry’s flowers."
Think of today's beautiful collection of power tools, then, as a sort of "flower arrangement for men". Can't you just smell the suction-pumped paraffin?
Now, I'm an aesthete. For me, the forms of power tools primarily summon up some kind of mysterious otherness. I frame them in purely aesthetic terms -- I love the colours, the weird shapes, the rational insanity of them. I also throw cultural frames around them -- the coolest stuff at Hellweg is kit by Einhell, a German brand with a very German solidity and conservatism to its forms. (And yet isn't there something funky, almost Nu-Rave about it too? Remember Altern 8?)
Here, then (from Einhell, but also Silverline, Makita, Sealey) are wondrous strange garden spreaders, sawing tables, electric generators, compressors, lathes, submersible pumps, bench drills, stick electrodes, gas heating reflectors, abrasive cut off saws, welding tools, aprons and gloves in primary colours, air accessory kits with quick couplings, dust free systems, shortwave infrared paint dryers, suction feed paraffin spray guns, nitrile gauntlets for use with thinners, and all sorts of other wonderful things I'll never, ever use, but am happy to stand and gawk at -- the way you might gaze in wonder at technology from a vanished superpower (Soviet-era space equipment, for instance).
Call it a "consumerism of the uselessly functional". Call it an ostranenie operation carried out on consumer desire in general ("Lovely, but what would I do with all this kit?"). Call it a poignant tension between the useful and the useless, the macho and the gay, the rockist and the pop. You can't help thinking of putting this stuff in an art gallery, but of course Koons has already done it (with his fetishistically clean industrial vacuums).
You also can't help (well, if you're me, anyway) remembering the kerfuffle that occurred at the London Design Museum in September 2004, when vacuum cleaner innovator James Dyson resigned as chairman of the board of trustees, accusing the museum of promoting "empty styling" over "function-led, problem-solving design". There's a gender element, an element of pure machismo, in the story: the final straw for Dyson, apparently, was the museum's replacement of a display of inventions and functional design products with an exhibition on 1950s flower arranger Constance Spry.
As I pointed out when I wrote my article on design rockism for AIGA Voice, matters aren't always that simple:
"Post-protestants desire functionality in ways that go beyond the merely pragmatic, and stray into the areas of the ethical, the cultural, the aesthetic, the psychological, the irrational. Jerry Seinfeld has a sketch about how men go and just watch other men when they’re doing DIY, because they have a magnetic attraction to the machismo of tools. Sure, it looks functional, but it’s also an aesthetic attraction, an irrational impulse deep within a certain kind of man. The rockists in the Dyson affair are incensed that the Design Museum should stage a flower arrangement show, but they don’t consider that their own attachment to functionality may be just as subjective, as aesthetic and as irrational as any response to Constance Spry’s flowers."
Think of today's beautiful collection of power tools, then, as a sort of "flower arrangement for men". Can't you just smell the suction-pumped paraffin?
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(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-05 04:12 pm (UTC)Power tools remind me of the Soviet Space program! Ranges of functional gear estrange our consumer experience in useful ways! Non-design is a kind of design! Functionalism is a kind of aestheticism! All this, plus lovely pictures and informed comments from intelligent people! And then you come along, Eeyore.
I don't spend eight hours in front of the computer. Carrying an iPod Touch with me means I can comment from anywhere, at any time. WHERE'S YOURS? as my man Nathan would say.
Lightening rod?
Date: 2008-01-06 12:35 am (UTC)Communicating through this means is interesting in that you don't have to face the person you are writing to, or can read their reaction to your post. As much as it often seems to be a conversation in the comment section, it seems sometimes to be a bit of a blunt instrument.
Now, I may be reading too much in to this? Is this just Brits taking the piss out of each other?(I'm half Mancunian Irish, so I do understand a bit of this).
However, I bring this up and perhaps it is related to the post from the other day about writing within your culture. My wife, Yoko had some trouble recently with friends who sent out a group mail. Of course, Japanese spoken language has ambiguity and a real give and take between the people in the conversation. However, an e-mail was sent out with strong sentiments and language that would not have occurred in a face to face conversation. Subsequently there was a break down in the relationship in this group because of the way the message was conveyed.
Well, without sounding too much like "Brown Bottle", I should say that I appreciate the time and effort you put into your blog. I know for myself it takes a while to digest what you have written, let alone comment on it- so, thank you.
David
Re: Lightening rod?
Date: 2008-01-06 12:49 am (UTC)Sometimes, though, I think the people branded "trolls" are some of the more creative people on, for instance, bulletin boards, and should be given a certain license. They're a bit like Shakespeare's fools, the ones allowed to tell the king important truths about his failings. (A troll-fool type should be witty and intelligent, though. There's no point being a stupid one.)
I find blogs with only positive and supportive comments rather dull. So I wouldn't turn off Anon posting or screen comments unless it got extremely abusive or just tediously irrelevant. The main hassle at the moment is just the way non-substantive and off-topic posts push the comments past 50 too quickly, which causes LiveJournal to collapse the page into a hard-to-read knot of sub-threads. Maybe our new Soviet overlords could fix that. They put a communist on Mars, after all.
Akemashite Omedeto
Date: 2008-01-06 12:51 am (UTC)