Why Bowie's new house won't be by Bow Wow

[imomus]

The picture below shows, fanned open, all the jpg images I had on my desktop at about 10 o'clock last night. They're basically the result of two data-mining enquiry lines, a Bowie line and a Bow Wow line. Atelier Bow Wow, that is. So, my favourite celebrity and my favourite architecture studio. (Click the picture to see it huge.)



Having opened these images all up together, I began to make connections between them. At the centre you can see Bowie playing a vicious capitalist refusing a young dot commer a line of finance in Austin Chick's forthcoming film "August". The film is set in 2001, but the room inhabited by Bowie's character is in the pseudo-Victorian style we could call "international rich chintz" or "hotel baroque".

That got me wondering whether the man I associate most fondly with the avant pop experiments of the "Lodger" album has built his new house in Shokan, near Woodstock, yet, and if so, what style it's in? The idyllic woods-and-lake photo below right in my spread is the site, Little Tonshi Mountain.

Google Earth left me none the wiser -- it wouldn't zoom far enough into this remote rural area to show construction, let alone the style of the building taking shape on Bowie and Iman's 64-acre plot in the Catskills. What we do know is that when Bowie commissioned a house on Mustique it was in a sort of Jet Set PoMo style -- a sprawling Balinese fantasy by Swedish architect Arne Hasselqvist, who also made Mustique villas for Mick Jagger and Princess Margaret. (Hasselqvist and his son died tragically in a fire in Nassau in 2001; they initially escaped, but were overcome by smoke when they returned to try to save some documents, possibly architectural plans.)

Bowie's PoMo "world architecture" house was featured in Architectural Digest magazine in September 1992. I remember running out and buying a copy on Tottenham Court Road, near where I was living at the time, and being a bit disappointed. The cover made it look very alluring and Asian, but inside there was a disappointing lack of personality. Everything was cream cushions and rattan chairs. It looked like a rental villa. Now, Bowie bought the Mustique place in the 80s, when he was particularly close with Mick Jagger, who had his own villa in exactly the same style pretty much next door. So there was probably some enormously-wealthy-rock-star peer pressure going on. But it's a bit disappointing how the rich fail to spend their money on really great architecture, and just go for chintz and "hotel baroque". And of course it's also disappointing -- and this is not unrelated -- when their records cease to be avant and just settle into "timeless" styles too. "Luxury hotel baroque" in your living arrangements seems to lead to "luxury hotel rock" in your music arrangements.

If I had Bowie's money, there's no doubt at all what I'd do. I'd commission Atelier Bow Wow to design my house. But, you know, it occurs to me that there's a reason rock stars, in general, have less-than-cutting-edge taste. If they were unremittingly avant, they'd never have got rich in the first place, because the large publics required to generate large fortunes are essentially conservative. In other words, a rock star rich enough to commission an avant-styled house is unlikely to have remained unaffected enough by his public and his rich peers to want something avant garde in the first place. It's impossible to be that popular without being, in your heart of hearts, somewhat populist in your tastes. And populist, when it comes to architecture, mostly means chintz.

To put that another way, if David Bowie had only made avant pop albums like "Lodger", he probably wouldn't have enough money now to commission the Atelier Bow Wow house he might well -- in that parallel world -- be inclined to crave.

Comments

[ex-newironsh15.livejournal.com]

In other words, a rock star rich enough to commission an avant-styled house is unlikely to have remained unaffected enough by his public and his rich peers to want something avant garde in the first place. It's impossible to be that popular without being, in your heart of hearts, somewhat populist in your tastes. And populist, when it comes to architecture, mostly means chintz.

is this your constructivist theory of housing construction??

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Is that what you call Constructivism? I call it Sod's Law!

[grzeg.livejournal.com]

Neil Stephenson, Snow Crash: “You know those [hotel] rooms in high-rise casinos in Atlantic City, where semi-retarded adults from South Philly are put after they’ve blundered into the mega-jackpot? They got everything that a dimwitted pathological gambler would identify with luxury: gold-plated fixtures, lots of injection-molded pseudo-marble, velvet drapes, and a butler.”

Not that Bowie is semi-retarded or a dimwitted pathological gambler, but many people do have normative predispositions toward what ‘luxury’ is -- rock stars, notwithstanding.

Have you checked out Bow-Wow’s ‘Pet Architecture’ or ‘Da-Me’ work? Good stuff.

Fan-atic

[pay-option07.livejournal.com]

One thing I learned about David is his ability to musically go from here to there without any one knowing or tipping his hand. He once if I remember moved to Berlin and lived alone anonymously before the trilogy release.
Also David's American tour was really defending some serious musical territory.From Real Cool World to Grunge/Indie.





It's safer to say what you see is what he is around!
Maybe an interview with the man from Brixton is on the horizon.

[(Anonymous)]

I see you have zep_out_door_6.jpg on your desktop. Is that the cover for "In Through the Out Door"? Rock on!

Re: Fan-atic

[pay-option07.livejournal.com]

Spoof!

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

Dammit, I told you kids to use coasters--there's recursive circles (http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v250/lord_whimsy/Miscellany%20IV/DSCN8782.jpg) all over the furniture! (http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v250/lord_whimsy/Miscellany%20V/DSCN2011.jpg)

And turn up that Ohio Players album!

[(Anonymous)]

You should call your next album "Berlin Through the Out Door"--it would mark the return to your metal roots that fans have been screaming for these last few years.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Ah, I was brought up in a house with that same high-backed wooden chair, the one you have by the fireplace! And it was even broken in the same way (suggesting the diverging rails leading from the seat to the neck rest are a bit of a design problem).

I do find this a "trad" environment rather than an "avant" one, though, whatever recursive circles you think are going on, and it does occur to me that you've been able to realize your dreams so thoroughly because those dreams were not, to begin with, anything that would terrify Hollywood. If your book had endorsed a less populist style (and I can hear you spluttering with indignation at the word, but still, to me this is populist), would the film rights have been sold?

We reach another interesting paradox of conservative populism here: conservative populists tend to portray the stuff they don't like -- the kind of stuff championed on this blog (http://www.egodesign.ca/en/) -- as an established professional mainstream they're rebelling against. (This, for instance, is the argument of the Stuckists against the Serotans.) But, while it's true that the avant style has become the status quo within a narrow cadre of the urban elite, the greater mass of the general public clings to conservative values. For this "trad mass", avant is still avant: it is still ahead of them. They're waiting for its revolutions to become sufficiently anaemic and familiar before they embrace them. Which they will, the way they eventually embraced Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Fauvism, and so on: a century or so late.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

But actually, the best critique of my stance in today's piece is:

"Nick, why do you allow a Balinese pastiche to be PoMo, but not a Victorian pastiche? After all, Post-Modernism flattens time just as it flattens space. Bowie can live in baronial Euro-splendour in Switzerland and orientalist World Architecture in the Caribbean and be of his time in both properties. Modernism separated the hip from the square, but Post-Modernism squares all circles."

And I'd have to say "Damn it, Me, you have a point there!"

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

Seems to me it's all 'trad', whatever that means anymore. The example you describe as 'new' is in an architectural style that is now well over a half-century old. I also think you're making a big assumption about modernist architecture being 'ahead" or 'avant': I used to walk through such surroundings as a child, and it evokes a sense of nostalgia, as it does for many people who have tired of it. It's all too convenient to paint those who find the style unappealing as backwards or, in my case, populist. That's like a chef saying that those who turn up their nose at his bland protein wedges are hopelessly unenlightened.

As for my own home surroundings, it's inaccurate to see it as a reactionary aesthetic: it's pop, not neo-victorian. It's a playful send-up of the set designs of gay art directors who worked on musicals like "Gigi" and the like. There's a bit of mid-century modern in there, but also plays with the idea of a live-in wunderkammern (perhaps the photos don't show this aspect, but it's there).

And wow--first you ply the old prudish "well at least I'm more avant" rationale on Bowie, now you go one step further by comparing what I do to the Stuckists and ascribe my success to being a tame, bourgeois hack? Whatever gets you through the night, Nick.

[microworlds.livejournal.com]

Oh dear, do I have to do another one of those slash videos with you in it? You make it so easy, Momus.

[kumakouji.livejournal.com]

"it occurs to me that there's a reason rock stars, in general, have less-than-cutting-edge taste. If they were unremittingly avant, they'd never have got rich in the first place, because the large publics required to generate large fortunes are essentially conservative."

How do you explain the mainstream popularity of Ikea? It's hardly chintz, in fact it's the opposite - utilitarian and modern.

Speaking of which, do you remember that Ikea advert imploring people to “Stop being so English (http://citypages.com/databank/20/991/article8243.asp)”? It featured a Swedish psychologist claiming the British are uptight due to their taste in “English” (read: chintz) furniture.

For christmas my Nan offered to buy me some new furniture. I chose a pine blanket box - untreated, flatpack, made of solid pine slats. My nan thinks it looks cheap apparently. I asked her to show me what she considered nice and (what a surprise) she shows me chintz.

My furnishing tastes are pretty much modern Scandinavian meets traditional rustic Japanese -- low furniture, solid natural materials, slight weathering, leaning towards utilitarianism. Basically the warm textures of traditional Japan taking the stark edge off modern Scandinavia. I just took a look Atelier Bow Wow *thumbs up* I'm a fan.

[kumakouji.livejournal.com]

This is what I love about the art croud: we have two heterosexual men falling out over tastes in furniture.

Can we not just agree to disagree?

Momus: Your "chintz = unsophisticated populist" stance is bull. one word: IKEA. Your minimalist, stark, bauhausy taste in architecture and furnishing isnt that avant. Every Joe Bloggs out there shops at Ikea.

Whimsy: You're chintz with a palette change. Eccentric chintz is still chintz. You're not avant either.

I think truly avant architecture and interiors need to be fiercely bizarre to the point of being anti-utilitarian. Thats my opinion, everything between that has been done.

To each man his own, and such...

[stanleylieber.livejournal.com]

How do you explain the mainstream popularity of Ikea?

$2.99 bookshelves

[kumakouji.livejournal.com]

I'm aware that being able to furnish an entire room for little over $300 is one of Ikeas key selling points, but my point is chintz doesnt = mainstream. Stark modernism is justas acceptable to the masses otherwise they would refuse to shop at Ikea.

It costs nothing to sit on the floor on pillows alá Japon, and that never caught on in the west... people dont like the aesthetic, they find it weird. Cost doesnt always dictate taste.

[stanleylieber.livejournal.com]

people don't like sitting on the floor.

Don't look too hard for a disagreement here.

[kumakouji.livejournal.com]

regardless, Ikea is hugely successful and mainstream. People obviously like modernist furnishings. It's not avant, that was my point.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Gay man doing good job of refereeing two straight men spilling quills bantam-fighting over sofa styles!

It's true that I do sometimes look at the place (and it's usually a Japanese place, like the housing Muji offers in Japan (http://www.muji.net/ie/se/)) where spare, modest Modernist design meets the mass market and feel the warm glow of aesthetic belonging. It's a glow I only tend to feel, as I say, in Japan, where I can identify with semi-mass market magazines like Ku:nel. Nothing in the West can really do that for me these days. Well, there's Kidswear magazine, but that's hardly mainstream.

I do notice an "error" I've been making all my life. As soon as I see "the new thing" I say "That's it, everything else must now cease. This is our new baseline." For instance, when I heard Kraftwerk for the first time, aged 15, all rock music except lab rock, post-rock, was basically dead in the water, invalid. Of course it wasn't, and that isn't the nature of Post-Modernism, where Kraftwerk's retro-futurism sits alongside Iron Maiden's retro-metal as "equally valid". I was acting as if it really were 1930 and Kraftwerk were Modernists who had just invented Cubism or Serialism or something, "made it new" in the Ezra Pound sense, and made everything else old. And this was probably a basic misunderstanding, on my part, of the way culture works now. Nothing is ever "over" now, nothing is ever forgotten. We've forgotten how to forget, and we've terminated termination. This removal of the possibility of a meaningful avant garde (which must be able to declare things "over" from time to time) is one of the things I hate most about PoMo. It's very disincentivizing for aesthetic progressives. In fact, it doesn't even allow that there can be such a thing.

[stanleylieber.livejournal.com]

i still agree

[stanleylieber.livejournal.com]

I do believe the rubric of taste in America has more to do with the thought that such choices require from the "decider." In laboratory tests, rats developed tumors when forced to make continuous choices instead of being allowed to fall into a familiar routine. In this way, the proliferation of Victorian and/or Modernist tastes has less to do with aesthetic awareness than it does herd behavior, surrendering of one's critical faculties to the recognizable and familiar.

[(Anonymous)]

I read somewhere that Bowie once bought a place in Kyoto but haven't seen it mentioned elsewhere and don't know if it is true. Given your interests and the theme of this piece it seems you are just the man to ask.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Two things make Ikea unusual amongst globally successful brands (and I agree it has become the monocultural supplier, the monopolist, the globalized definer of the look and feel of our domestic habitat). First, it's Swedish, and as we've often seen in these pages, Sweden is out on its own, attitudinally speaking. Second, it's privately owned by its founder, who refuses to issue shares or respond to stockholder pressure, and who has a clear set of aesthetic values he once outlined in a book. (Kamprad's supposed Nazism is a silly red herring, BTW. Let's not go there.)

Now, put those two facts together and you get something interesting -- a company that sets standards rather than following them. A company that's somewhat Reithian in its desire to give people what they don't necessarily want, at a price they can't ignore. I think if Ikea had shareholders, we'd see some pressure to make more chintz available in the stores. It would certainly wider Ikea's appeal. But Ikea isn't like that. It sets the standards. And this is down to Kamprad and his enormous wealth, his clear aesthetic goals. But it's also down to the nature of Sweden's difference from other nations: the fact that Sweden is different in an aspirational way. It's seen as being ahead. The idea of "the progressive" is not irrelevant here, and not dead. People actually don't like what they see at Ikea, but they feel that its taste might be "ahead" of theirs, and the price seduces them, and soon they do begin to respect the design values too.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

He did have a place in Kyoto, yes. In Gion, I think. He still had it when he married Iman, because they spent their honeymoon there, or some of it.

I have come to the conclusion from this video, kumakouji

[microworlds.livejournal.com]

you= the dog
Momus= the baby