Comfortable Disorientation

Watching, guiding, guarding or invading?

 

We braved the rain to go and see the Anthony Gormley exhibition at the Hayward this morning.  It's a brilliant adventure playground of a show. I'm not sure what was most fun the Blind Light fog or tailing kids and listening to what they made of it all:

"is it standing on it's corners, like going on tiptoes?"

"why did he only eat some of the bread?"

We really enjoyed it all, but agreed we liked the Event Horizon statues all over the South Bank best of all.  I'm not sure how many we clocked in total, I kept recounting the same ones. They're really affecting - quiet, dignified, vulnerable yet immensely dominant.

Stay gold, Ponyboy

Now the last time I posted about a project by Simon Pope I got into a debate about whether participatory experiential work qualifies as art worth funding.  I don't really want to go there again, I feel no more qualified to judge such things then I did that time round.

All I know is that Pope's projects seem to explore and connect things that are of interest to me. For example, Charade involves memory, cultural archiving, walking and identity.  I'm thinking of taking part:

Television's over. Networks are down. The radio is silent. All files erased. Imagine every book, film, play or song is about to be destroyed.
What would you save?

Each participant chooses a cultural work and sets out to become a living archive. Memorising the work and ultimately becoming it. In the process the group are going to meet up for walks around London.

The sensible thing to do would be to pick something short like a song, but I've never really been the sensible sort.  Both to keep true to what is most important to me and for the challenge, it has to be a book.

I've decided on The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton for a few reasons:

• I genuinely love it
• All those adolescent repeat readings/film viewings mean I already have chunks of it committed to memory
• I really believe it is a book worth saving
• It's celebrating it's 40th anniversary this year
• The narrative is first person (somehow I think this is going to help me commit it to memory)
• It's short enough that the task of learning it doesn't absolutely terrify me   

Not quite sure how I'm going to go about the task as yet - I'll let you know how I get on...

Wobbles

This is a note to self really.

Sometimes when you're doing a group or an interview (or whatever) and everything's going smoothly, you stumble across a wobble.

Lets say for instance you are researching new ideas, putting them in front of a group of people and exploring their responses. Everyone seems to like an idea and are happily telling you why it's so great, but then you get hit by a wobble. It can be almost imperceptible - a slight pause of discomfort; a quaver of doubt; a teeny concern that is virtually whispered before being discounted. Perhaps you choose to probe it further and the group gamely considers the issue, but decides it's irrelevant. Or, perhaps they refuse to entertain it at all; the person who initially whispered it backtracks "I was just being silly, ignore me".

As a researcher you are left with a nag and the problem of knowing what to do with it. Suggesting it might be a bigger issue is unlikely to make you popular, just when you were already feeling on shaky ground to your lack of hard evidence. Or you could ignore it altogether, sticking to a straightforward story and convincing yourself it's the right thing to do.

It's not an easy one to navigate. But an inconvenient little wobble in a research context, could mean something more significant in real life. I think we have a duty to report them. Carefully.

The Megatron

All this talk about Innocent and McDonalds has got me reminiscing about my days as a burger-flipping, till-tart working in a space ship.

The Megatron had started life as an themed fast food in (I'm guessing here) the late eighties. It was the talk of the school, though the closest I got to seeing it for myself was watching the lasers from my bedroom window. The word in the classroom, from kids whose parents were obviously more easy to persuade than my own, was that the experience involved ordering from touch-screen consoles, being served by robots and star-shaped fries. I also remember being told it was a complete rip-off so perhaps that's why it didn't last long. I'd always imagined the interior as 80's-style futurism, though it looks more 60's influenced in these photos on the architect's website - somewhere the Jetsons might eat:

In 1993 it opened as a McDonalds franchise. The original interior was ripped out to make way for the standard McDonalds' fare; the burgers came down in price but the fries were now straight; instead of robots you were likely to be served by me or one of my 6th form mates. I'm no particular fan of McD's these days, but my memories are fond though no-doubt rose-tinted. There was always plenty of gossip, intrigue and scandal and there's something special about camaderie of a young team engaged in mindless tasks.

I don't know when the Megatron finally closed, but it now sits abandoned alongside the A14 near Alconbury. Ripe for intrepid urban photographers like Ed The Greek:

and Turkey

Heroes and villains

When I first moved to London my housemates and I used to play a game while watching TV. As soon as a character appeared on screen, we had to shout out "goodie" or "baddie", making a snap decision about the character's destiny based only on their first appearance.  Overtime we developed schemas and rules (in TV-land, moustaches are usually a sure sign of badness) as well as developing a separate "expendable" category for those we didn't expect to make it to the end of the show or film.

We used to delight in bemoaning the lack of proper goodies or baddies, enjoying the let down of appropriate moral complexity in characters. Of course, the best heroes are deeply flawed, this makes them human and gives them the potential to be heroic.  Likewise, few villains are devoid of any redeeming features.  We know this, yet still often wish it wasn't so. 

Part of us wants our heroes to remain perfect, preserved on the pedestals where we place them. This gives us hope, something true to believe in.  And we want our villains to to remain bad, rotten to the core. There's always a disappointing sense of loss when the bad guys redeem themselves.  We'd rather they stayed bad, ideally meeting with ghastly sticky ends and recognising the error of their ways only when it's too late. We enjoy having something to hate because it makes us feel better about being imperfect ourselves.

We don't like it when our heroes start fraternising with their nemeses apparent. It upsets our sense of world order and it tarnishes our image of perfection.  But really, aren't the true heroes those that help the baddies to become good?