The Totality (For Kids)

Feels unseemly to direct attention to something I've written, as we all teeter on the precipice... but here goes: a while ago, I wrote a piece on Malcolm McLaren, Sex Pistols, Situationism, punk, the notion of cultural terrorism, etc etc, for the London Review of Books,  at insane length. Which LRB expertly condensed to half its size and has now published.  It is loosely - very loosely - tethered to Paul Gorman's equally enormous biography of McLaren. 

Of course, my author's eyes see all the things missing, but no doubt, to anyone sane and impartial, it's  vastly improved by being streamlined. I expect someday I'll make the full monster available. 

Experimental Jetset - Superstructures

I was really excited to participate in a project created by Dutch artist collective Experimental Jetset, in which they invited a bunch of critics and theorists - including Owen Hatherley, McKenzie Wark, Ian F. Svenonius and many others - to write annotations to a text of their own. These annotations are mostly more like mini-essays than footnotes, so the size of the accumulated supplementary text far surpasses the original document. The resulting compendium Superstructures is a  visually and typographically exquisite volume dense with stimulating writing addressing four zones of 20th Century utopian urbanism:  The Constructivist City, The Situationist City, The Provotarian City, The Post-Punk City. 

(If you are thinking my footnotes would be restricted to the part on post-punk, actually no, I had some things to say about Situationism and even Provo, via a certain favorite psychedelic song). 

The book can be ordered directly from Roma Publications in Amsterdam, but is also widely available in art bookshops and museums etc through Idea Books distribution. 

Here is the official release rationale: 

"Superstructures (Notes on EJ, Vol. 2) is an inquiry into the role of the city as an infrastructure for language (and simultaneously, into the role of language as an infrastructure for the city), as seen through the lens of four historical movements: Constructivism, the Situationist International, Provo, and the Post-Punk explosion. Based on a research project (and accompanying exhibition) by Experimental Jetset, the publication features footnotes written by 20 guest-authors – including Linda van Deursen, Owen Hatherley, Dirk van den Heuvel, Tom McDonough, Adam Pendleton, Simon Reynolds, McKenzie Wark, Lori Waxman, Mimi Zeiger, and many others. The 420-page paperback comes with a 26-page zine, zooming in on the design typology of the original exhibition."

^^^^^^^^

Although Superstructures is Volume 2 in a trilogy of Notes on Experimental Jetset volumes, it's actually the last of the three to be published (yes, confusing, but apparently there's a logic to that). 

Here is Experimental Jetset's explanation of the entire project series: 

"The first one (‘Statement and Counter-Statement – Notes on EJ, Vol. 1’, from 2015) was basically a monograph, showing our work as a whole. We also asked some people (Linda van Deursen, Mark Owens, Ian Svenonius) to write essays about us, without mentioning us – so that was a nice twist.

"We’re very bad (extremely bad) in doing lectures – but we explain the paperback in full during this talk:

"The second one (‘Full Scale False Scale’ – Notes on EJ, Vol. 3’, from 2019) basically focused on one single project – the long-term installation we recently created at the MoMA in New York. It’s basically a reader, compiled of texts we read while working on that particular project – mostly texts that deal with the transition from European early-modernism to American late-/post-modernism.

"The third paperback (‘Superstructures – Notes on EJ, Vol. 2’, from 2020) is dealing mostly with our influences (Constructivism, the Situationist International, Provo, Post-Punk), exploring the ways in which these movements used the city as an infrastructure for language.

"In other words, the first book (Vol. 1) is about our work as a whole, the second book (which is actually Vol. 3) is about one specific project, while the third book (Vol. 2) is about our influences in general."

life's a beach

"If there's one thing practically all futurologists once agreed on, it's that in the 21st century there would be a lot less work..."  Owen H's Guardian piece on how technological progress has not led, as was once expected, to the abolition of work reminded me of  Bow Wow Wow's "W.O.R.K. (N.O. Nah NO! NO! My Daddy Don't)"
  

 

                 
If you don't feel like twisting your neck around and squinting to read, the kernel of the lyric is "'T.E.K. technology /Is DEMOLITION of DADDY / Is A.U.T. Autonomy". That's Malcolm McLaren taking the Situationist idea that automation would lead to a world liberated from labour and adapting it for the age of Thatcher-imposed mass doledrums.  Demolishing Daddy would good for everybody, including Daddies (here doubly signifying as wage-slaves and bosses), because everybody would be freed up to live like children, dedicated only to play and imagination. Or, as per the other key line "demolition of the work ethic takes us to the age of the primitive", like tribal societies,  naively imagined to live without alienation.  Paradise regained.


I was thinking of the Situationists and  this idea that "no work = paradise" yesterday afternoon. We were at the beach and I remembered their slogan "under the pavement lies the beach".  For a second, I wondered what was so good about beaches, compared with sidewalks? (As well as expediting you through the world of business and commerce, paved urban walkways lead to all kinds of cool places... they are also better surfaces for aimless dérive and "kaleidoscope endowed with consciousness" artist-as-flaneur-ism).  But that's because I was going through this phase I often go through immediately after arriving at the beach, which is feeling restless and trapped: cut off from my usual networks of stimulation. "There's nothing to do here!" Then I capitulate, remember that the point of the beach is to do nothing, in a variety of enjoyably pointless ways.  Splashing about, getting bowled over by waves.  The building of castles or networks of canals in the sand teaching you, in the most kindly and pleasing-to-look-at way, certain things about Time and futility and "all this too must pass away."


It's the same with vacations: I kinda dread them at first... then slowly succumb. At first I don't want to give up my habitual state of nervous unrest.  But slowly and steadily, Life reduces to absolute simplicity. Extremes of temperature and sensation. Hot, cool. Dry, wet. Exercise, rest. It reduces to the basic functions of  life. "What shall we eat?".  You can feel your mind gradually emptying.  The books and magazines you brought (in order to make productive use of all that free time) go unread. It's genuinely therapeutic, totally necessary.  A tonic. But then it's time to go back. Back to work. And I'm always more than ready.

A permament vacation would be a hellish existence. Likewise the beach... A nice place to visit, but you wouldn't want to live there. (People who do live at the beach full-time often seem a little cracked. Either that, or they've retired, given up on work).

And now I recall, one of McLaren's early slogans with Bow Wow Wow was "sun, sea and piracy", they were meant to be playing tropical rhythms...  in one interview I remember he unfurled this endearingly barmy fantasy of  a man-made sun that would be tethered above the U.K. and would turn this grey-skied country into an endless summer paradise...

 

See also: the Parrotheads and Margaritaville and "Cheeseburger in Paradise" - a similar fantasy of getting away from it all and never coming back...

Interviewer: In one word, what's this all about?


Parrothead #1: Non-work.


Parrothead #2: Living.... This is what we work for, 364 days a year, is one day, to really do what we want to do.