Things that look like they should

According to prototype theory (Eleanor Rosch, University of California at Berkeley, and others), as we discover our world from the earliest days of childhood onwards, for the many kinds of object and situation we encounter, we subconsciously select our “best” example, our favourite or “central” one. Often this is the one we run into first, or the one closest to home, or the one with which we are most familiar. So it might be an armchair, a TV set, kettle, tree, bicycle, greenhouse, Christmas dinner, snowstorm, dogturd, uncle, or whatever – or a little further afield, a cinema, lollipop lady, seaside resort, windmill, football match, classroom, mountain, or motorway service area. Subsequently, those early experiences influence our preferences and even our understanding and use of language. While the most insistent effects soon wane with age and exposure to many other instances, to an extent we always retain those homely, local, paradigm examples, against which all other instances are likely to be found wanting - even official, important, generally rated as best, or “metropolitan” examples. Not that we normally make that comparison consciously or deliberately.

Never mind; it’s only a theory. On Friday I visited Oakham, the county town of Rutland. Oakham (slightly remarkably) still has a station, originally on the Midland Railway from St Pancras to Nottingham via Corby, the Harringworth viaduct and Melton Mowbray. Though still sometimes used as a diversionary route for the Midland line, these days most trains calling at Oakham are en route along a rather tortuous journey between the West Midlands and East Anglia. During my brief visit on Friday the electronic display was advising that the train to Stansted Airport was delayed. No clue as to how much delayed, although it was already some 15 minutes overdue. A predictably uninformative recorded announcement was hectoring the victims waiting on the platform to “remember the Three Esses”, which as far as I recall stands for “Screw you, Suckers, Sod off”. I was so glad not to be enduring that familiar irritating predicament, and could walk away from it.

At the south end of Oakham is a level crossing, for a main road near to wide and complex junctions, and though modernised, it is the sort of set-up that makes you (or at any rate, people like me) think about model railway layouts. At one side of the road is a footbridge, and on the other side a signal box. Both look absolutely perfect for capture and installation on a model railway. What I didn’t realise until later is that they have been.

The footbridge dates from 1901.

 The signal box dates from 1899. 

Both are listed structures, and it turns out that both have been used as the basis for Airfix models. In other words, for the purpose of constructional play, for model making, they are evidently prototypical structures, and therefore presumably perceived as the best of their species, the most typical, the most archetypal. What, archetypes in England’s smallest county? You must be joking ! You’d never run into C. G. Jung in this neck of the woods.

 
Although I did make a couple of Airfix aeroplanes as a child, it’s not a label of which I have any great knowledge or intimacy, for my imaginary constructional realm primarily involved Meccano and Hornby as its two core brands. Hornby station architecture tended towards the modernist and the deco, very Southern Region, shades of Richmond or Surbiton or the Chessington branch. Fine in their way, but here in Oakham I could see that the Midland Railway features as adopted for this footbridge and signal box were spot on. They looked exactly like they should. More so, in fact.

A loss of innocence and a lack of transparency

There’s a priceless moment in the 1979 film “Being There”, based on Jerzy Kosinski’s 1970 novel of the same name, in which the character played by Peter Sellers, in one of his last film roles, is asked about his sexual preferences. Sellers plays a nice but dim gardener, charming and innocent and gentlemanly, who has spent most of life in the employee of a wealthy family in Washington, DC. His name gets distorted - as the plot unfolds - to Chauncey Gardiner, although his real name is Chance, and his occupation, gardener. Most of his spare time is spent watching television. He becomes embroiled with media and political types, and before long seems headed for the White House. Well now, who could imagine such a thing, a complete idiot becoming President of the United States?

Anyway, back to the priceless moment. Because of his evident naïvety and asexuality, enormous humour is elicited when he’s asked about his tastes. “I like to watch”, he declares. “I like to watch TV”, he adds, with innocent hints of further deviancy.

Liking to watch. Hm. So we’re back to last time’s uninvited theme – voyeurism. The trouble is, there appears to be no technical term that means “liking to watch”, without sexual connotations. Scopophilia and scoptophilia, as with voyeurism, both imply liking to look at activities or items of erotic interest, although their Greek roots are not so restrictive. It’s just us, with our nasty take on everything. Can there be no innocent vision? Even without a word for it?

So be it. I like - not so much to watch - as to look. As someone who has always drawn or painted, I have always liked to look at the world around me. I was blessed with a pair of eyes that have served me well. My dad, who was a proper artist, taught me to observe. Not everyone is so lucky. However, these days most people carry around a device that can be used as a camera, and as such it can be used as an aid in learning how to see, to frame, to compose, to crop. If they practise this, in time, they won’t need the device; they’ll see that way out of habit, and their world will be that much more interesting, more artistic, perhaps even more beautiful. Looking at things is good.

When I’m travelling I often like to look out of the window. I even do this on the tube. On aircraft I love to look at clouds, down at the ocean, at the strangely flattened mountains, at cities where I’m about to land, at everything. So when I read this week that Emirates wants to introduce planes without windows, I was horrified.

Building aircraft without windows can no doubt improve their structural integrity, and prevent passengers from being sucked out into the pale blue yonder. I’ve never  flown with Emirates, so I don’t know if this is a peculiar problem that happens to them a lot. But, no – quite apart from the arguments about safety and claustrophobia – this is a perfectly daft idea. I want to look out at real sky, at what’s up there and what’s down below, not at some televised real-time version of it, however technically clever, however good for the airframe and not getting sucked out. I’ll take my chances. All right, many people don’t want to look out, they want to work or read or play or watch films or listen to music; trans-oceanic flights (and others) can be very long and boring; many flights operate at night. But do you think the airlines are going to be happy for long just showing you the passing scenery? Nope, there’ll be a commercial break just as you get to that interesting glacier or high level view of Paris or Chicago, the very moment the Bay of Naples comes into view. There’ll be a trailer for your destination, its hotels, its car hire firms, movies showing next month. Some airlines – no guessing which ones – will charge you for the privilege of having / not having this facility. And what they do for aircraft they’ll want to do for trains, cars and buses, and certainly for underground systems. Once again, the curse of electronics (though if your next station is Neasden, they may be able to brighten your day). And of course if they do the same thing for office windows your workspace in Slough or Swindon may suddenly become more appealing. “If it’s Monday it must be the Maldives”. No, bad idea.

Transport planners never get it, do they. It’s always all about money and business opportunities, never about journeys or places or being left on your own. None of these people understand that the enjoyment of travel as it is, is something that some people – mostly old duffers like me from the pre-digital age – want and value. Travel as places, as geography, as what you see out of the window. The sort of inconvenient people who don’t respond to advertisements but who want as much freedom and privacy as possible, not being dictated to by some teenage nerd with a techno-fetish or a marketing wazzock with a product, and most of all, not wanting to be the victim of some inarticulate announcer (“this is Alison, your train manager”)  fond of their own amplified voice (“remember the three esses”). People who like the real, natural, world, not a virtual replica of it. Already it’s bad enough being stuck next to a “pillar” on a train, or being on one of those trams plastered with hideous mesh-like adverts, or on a plane not being able to get near a window.

If Emirates get their way and other airlines follow, then as far as I’m concerned they can create a virtual me, stick me next to a virtual window, and send me to a virtual destination far away. As for the real me, I’ll stay at home, then take a walk and look at some trees.

Sorry, windows were invented a long time ago so you can look through them. That’s what they’re for.

This story reminded me of a brief folly of mine at the age of about nine, when I was going through an inventing phase. I’d seen a sundial somewhere, only the sun wasn’t shining, so it didn’t work properly. “I can do better than this”, I thought. So I “invented” a device which consisted of a horizontal clock face, with a spike sticking up in the centre, and a light bulb affixed to a rotating plate worked by an electric motor. The plate would complete one revolution every 12 hours, and the bulb and spike would produce a shadow that would travel round the clock face so you could tell the time. Brilliant. A sundial that would work 24/7, even when it was raining or nighttime. Disappointingly, I never thought to invent a window that you couldn’t see through.

 
Next time: reinventing the wheel.

Oh, Hoppery Day

There was a day last week, Wednesday I think it was, when I received a postcard (something of a pleasurable rarity these days) from a friend who lives in the Netherlands. He’d visited an exhibition of American Realist art in the north-eastern Dutch town of Assen, and the card was of “Morning Sun”, painted by Edward Hopper in 1952. Wonderful. I enjoy a good Hopper of a Wednesday morning. As, arguably, the greatest Realist painter of the twentieth century, Hopper has long been one of my favourite artists. Also, as someone happy in the ordinary, shabby environments of daily life, he is someone to whom I can relate. As, I suspect, can many people.

Later that day, full of Hoppery anticipation, I watched a programme, one of a series, about American art. This one was supposedly about the effects of the big city – essentially New York – upon artists living there, and especially on those who had emigrated from eastern Europe. Just my sort of thing, or so I thought. Sadly, the programme was a total disappointment, with a presenter who – despite an uncanny ability to identify the Brooklyn Bridge at close range - frequently got in the way (literally as well as figuratively) of the works he was describing. He made me feel itchy, and not in a nice way.

You can’t libel the dead, which is just as well. Hopper was described as a voyeur who rode the elevated lines of New York City so that he could look in upon ladies through upstairs windows. That’s how he got his material for the likes of “Morning Sun”, according to this presenter. My understanding – gleaned, admittedly, from books, and not from any inside source available only to clever people in the art world - is that Hopper mostly used his wife, Jo, as the model for the female subjects in his paintings. While it was made clear that Hopper was not a Peeping Tom in the normal sense, “voyeur” is a word with a specific meaning. Unfortunate, to say the least.

Next, Hopper was labelled a curmudgeon, not – one might have imagined - an essential fact in a high speed tour of the man’s role in art history. Then there was all the usual tired old guff about “Nighthawks”, loneliness and alienation in the big city, the psychological spaces between people, and so on. Yawn. Nothing about the sheer beauty of the paintings, the atmospheres, their inspiration, the celebration of place, the lights and weathers and seasons and times of day. Just the old urban alienation shtick. Voyeurism, curmudgeon, alienation. Tick. Job done.  And then rapidly off topic to something that the presenter evidently liked; some celebrated daubs by émigrés with long and crunchy birth names whose pernickety enunciation he  repeatedly demonstrated. Not really what you want in a programme with the potential to educate and to appetise. Hopper-maligned, I hopped off to bed, hopping mad.

Inevitably, as a Realist, as a technically competent artist, whose works are pleasant to look at and easy to understand, and as someone with wide appeal (as witnessed by calendar sales, year after year) Hopper is not a significant focus of interest for the Art Establishment. He’s not likely to impress the polysyllabically enabled critics and curators who – together with the works they so admire - were so effectively destroyed by the superb Jonathan Meades, in a recent programme on “Jargon”.

As usual, Meades was inventive, scathing, hilarious, hugely intelligent, hyper-articulate, rivetting, making full use of television as a medium upon which can be presented simultaneously an imaginative and knowledgeable presenter able to act and to mimic, accompanied by pertinent background images, text, and music. Proper multimedia. One’s only criticism of Meades is that he provides so much that it’s hard to take it all in. This single programme about the present day abuse of language could and should be expanded into a whole series, covering, for example, corporate life, television reporters, sports, politics, academia, the internet, and the diversity and equality industries. Meades makes one painfully aware – sometimes from laughing too much - of just how moronic most television, and most of modern life, actually is.

A modern life which would have been the despair of Edward Hopper. Famously, the artist stated that his ambition was to paint the sunlight on the side of a house. What he also painted, although I don’t think he ever said as much, explicitly, was silence. While loneliness and alienation are not desirable states, aloneness, solitariness, and quiet can be. Silence is what, so often, we lack.

 
In the overcrowded cities of our overpopulated land it’s hard to find somewhere uncontaminated not so much by the banalities of excessive commentary and advice on how we’re supposed to think but by hideous noise; “attention, this vehicle is reversing”, car alarms, someone jabbering highly important nonsense into a phone, some discordant hate-filled noise blaring from a portable gadget or car-bound device. The curse of electronics and its spin-offs. And the visual insults. Perfect views ruined by big fat ugly parked cars, skips, scaffolding, graffiti, phone masts, wind farms, ill-placed signs, delivery vans, yes, always a bloody white van comes tearing round the corner the moment you reach for your camera. 

Oh, for an empty street, silent but for perhaps an ambient hum of city energy, the miaouw of a streetwise moggie, the confident clatter of a distant train, a plaintive horn on a riverboat, even the occasional echo of a school playground – streets away - off a vast blind wall … Sunshine and silence. Something to paint. Oh, Hoppery Day.

Unironic Ikonic

A vision of the world, now and in the near future, as dreamed up from within the business parks of genericised Silicon Valley, is presented in an exhibition at the Ikon Gallery in Oozells Square, Birmingham. I visited it on Saturday. Called “Internet Giants : Masters of the Universe”, and devised by Ben Langlands and Nikki Bell, it features imagery and statements relating to (primarily American) information technology companies and their bosses.  

As far as I can tell it’s not supposed to be in any way ironic, critical or cautionary. What would be the point? Ordinary folk can draw their own conclusions, while these powerful and wealthy individuals are insensitive to all uncertainties, just as (as we have seen in a number of recent cases) they are to small matters like ethics, national laws, taxation, or intellectual property rights. They’re not bothered by the doubts and quibbles of lesser mortals, and are very sure of what’s good for everyone. Some of their products can be, of course, quite handy, and very evidently, many people like to use them. Unfortunately what is on offer at Ikon is completely up-itself, obscure, joyless, and tedious. A successful exhibition, like any successful work of art, shouldn’t need long-winded accompanying documentation to tell you what it’s supposed to mean (assuming it means anything).

The explanatory printed guide refers to a series of pixellated “mosaic” icons (well, of course) of 26 IT luminaries. These are, as the leaflet says, “combined in diptychs with their inspirational utterances”. What that means is that unless you’re seriously cross-eyed – or preferably “pixellated” yourself (there’s a big Wetherspoons nearby in Broad Street) -  it’s hard to tell what or who they are. Not that it matters a great deal. Megalomania is nothing special these days.

However, there is one “inspirational utterance” that outshines all the others, and it is by Mike Krieger of Instagram, who says “just because you’ve googled something doesn’t mean you’ve learned”. That’s a golden rule of education which should be etched in big letters across the top of every screen and taught to every infant well before it reaches – puling and wailing - for its first gadget. Most of the other “inspirational utterances” in the exhibition are too embarrassingly inane to be worth repeating here; a few more are sensible but state the obvious. The following five are my shortlist for, shall we say (politely), the most frightening and deadly unironic of these “utterances”:

1) “There is an important artistic component in what we do” (Larry Page - Google)

2) “You have to make words less human and more a piece of the machine” (Marissa Mayer – Google, Yahoo)

3) “I’m trying to make the world a more open place” (Mark Zuckerberg - Facebook)

4) “We want Google to be the third half of your brain” (Sergey Brin - Google)

5) “I want to put a ding in the universe” (Steve Jobs - Apple)

I’m tempted to add a sixth: “I’m an obnoxious undersized arrogant charmless pointy-headed geek with a small penis. I have a problem with the real world, and especially with people”. (Greedy Retard - Fruitcake). Perhaps I should go back and scribble it on a wall and see if anyone notices.

Suitably unimpressed I emerged into the sunshine, smug with the thought that none of the above characters would ever understand why an Oozell can never be Square.

Aesthetic frights in Liverpool 8

Few buildings in English provincial cities possess such a massive, dominant, solid, commanding presence as the Anglican Cathedral that sits atop the considerable incline to the south east of Liverpool city centre. Generally speaking I am reassured by the presence of this building, and from time to time I seek it out as a place of refuge and solace. Inside the Cathedral I feel physically, psychologically and spiritually safe; protected from the rest of a world in which, increasingly, I don’t. Together with the railway termini at Paddington and St Pancras, and the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill-on-Sea, Liverpool Cathedral is one of the ‘safest’ buildings that I know and love in this country. From the outside, though, I’m not so sure.

But – apparently, and to quote one of Liverpool’s most famous sons - I’m not the only one. In a book called “Liverpool 8” (Murray, 1982) another John - John Cornelius - wrote amusingly and with warped Blakean undertones of the aesthetic fright caused by the Anglican Cathedral, of how it appeared strangely between buildings, sometimes looking unnaturally close, and how its shape changed when seen from different angles. "During the day”, he wrote, ”the Cathedral is weird, but fairly benign. At night? Well, it fairly puts the wind up me, sometimes. I don't mind telling you. I think it's something to do with the shape of it, like a head perched on a huge pair of shoulders. Yes: that's it. It's the slavish symmetry, the fearful symmetry, of the thing that causes the problems. I hate walking past it at night". He offered a drawing of himself scurrying along Hope Street, past the Cathedral, with a couple of "eyes" drawn in the tower. The picture was captioned: "Hurry quickly past, hoping it's not looking". Shudder.

Because of its immense size, in certain lights and from certain angles, the building can indeed be perceived as monstrous and scary, sat there in all its stony solidity on its ridge. You need a suitable state of mind, of course, to fully appreciate the scariness. Because of its great height the tower can be seen from many miles around – even from the Clwydian hills of Flintshire – and naturally it’s also very intrusive into views closer at hand. Combine massivity with height and mental preparedness and you have three useful ingredients for constructing an aesthetic fright, to use Susanne Langer’s term. Add a fourth component, surprise, and you have a complete recipe. Off you go.

As you walk round the surrounding area, not just the adjacent Hope Street as per John Cornelius’s description, but slightly further afield, try and solicit surprise. I know, it’s a bit like trying to tickle yourself, but areas likely to be rewarding in this respect are the Ropewalks quarter and the up and coming Baltic Triangle, and more especially the districts to the south and east, Toxteth, primarily, the area popularly known by its postcode, Liverpool 8. 

 
Naturally, you will expect to see the Cathedral along the line of sight of suitably aligned streets. There it will be, reliably, in the distance. What you may not expect is when it peers over other buildings at you, when it “sees” you, when it “gets” you. Even on a sunny day, even among today’s cheerful replacements for the dark streets of the old inner city, the effect can be to send a shudder up your spine, to raise the goosebumps, to activate the hairs on the back of your neck. If you are feeling guilty – and you must be guilty of something – you may suspect that it isn’t just the Cathedral that is “looking” at you, but that the Almighty is deploying one of his more spectacular architectural minions to take a closer look at you, to inspect you, perhaps to find you wanting - a theistic extension of the pathetic fallacy, if you like. OK, mad, surreal, but enjoy anyway. And while you’re around those parts, take a trip to the top of the tower; the views are wonderful. Partly, of  course, because Liverpool is wonderful and partly, because when you’re up there, on top of it, the Cathedral can’t “get” you.