In this week’s Douglas Coupland interview in the Guardian – a short and wanton piece which left me entirely unspent – a few points appeared from the rabble of words which appeared to merit further consideration. (I’m not attacking Coupland here, his thought process was almost shown to be illuminating, rather the decision to waste two of the four allocated pages on a headline and a head shot which contributed little to the study of the man in question).
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/sep/07/decca-aitkenhead-douglas-coupland
Hmmm. I remember the 70s really well, and the thing about the 70s was everything was just decaying, nothing worked, either politically or in any other way. And the only technological changes were that phones went from rotary to push-button. Then in the 80s there were a few more things, and in the 90s there was email, but even if you had it there weren’t many places to go with it.
And then, suddenly, collectively, since 2000, we’ve had Google, Ebay, Facebook, social media, the digitisation of the world’s economic system, the iPhone. My friend’s got an iPhone you can point at a sudoku puzzle in a news-paper, and it recognises the numbers and builds you a new electronic one, and then it solves it for you in about three seconds. It’s just voodoo, it’s totally spooky…
…Soon it won’t be the internet any more, it’ll just be like air, like somehow they’ll integrate the internet into the air. And God’s name will have ended up being Google, because that’s the way it worked out.
Scary stuff. Coupland’s attitude towards modernity and everything he has so long been heralded as the harbinger of as a result of 1991’s Generation X appears incomplete throughout this interview, ranging from pro- to anti- in a heartbeat. So it should be. The big questions which lie dormant, waiting to take the 2010s by force, oscillate emphatically between utopian and dictatorial. The internet’s levelling power in a globalised world versus the unaccountable and unelected few behind its biggest weapons stands to wreak havoc on democracy.
Moreover, the accessability of things makes for a world increasingly full of clutter, removing room for the enjoyment of the everyday. We need to ween ourselves away from the multitudes and enjoy simple existence. I smile every time I watch populist cookery programmes propulgating the wonders of home cooking and, indeed, home growing. Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s campaign to get Britain gardening brings a pang of joy to my heart, even if he is a pig-nosed Etonite toffee chewer.
In one second, I consider modernity as too big and unimaginable. Yet the grandiose conflab in the above interview also made me think of a work by James Rosenquist featuring a huge telephone cable, like a celebration of technology’s infantesimal details on a scale suitable to those unable to process such complexities. Like a reader’s digest or something. Power is big. In the 60s and seventies, things became big. Increasingly, things, ideas and reality are almost tooo big.
I saw this work by Rosenquist at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art years back, Leakey Ride for Dr Leakey. The idea inherent pervades Rosenquist’s career, even now thirty/forty years on. Similarly, Claes Oldenburg’s sculptures, such as those exhibited in New York’s Green Gallery in ’62 (below) propose something similar.
What was once a celebration of, and hyperbolation of commerce and consumerism now appears almost homely. A pompous uprising for the things in your cupboards, not the ethereal beams of stuff which enable the internet to run amok.
All of these things were on my mind after reading the above interview, sitting down to a tasty corn on the cob, and BOY was it tasty.
Here is something worth celebrating, worth idolising, pure flavour, unidirectional synapse response, its just you and the sweetcorn. REALITY.
I heard nothing. People were speaking, I heard nothing. Just the sound of my on chewing, the slap of saliva on corn, and the gracious sound of mmmmmmmmmm from my lips, like Bill Murray in What About Bob?
Lovely Chicken, Lovely Potato Salad. Mm mm mm mm mm mm mmmmmmm. ummmhhhhhhh!
And God’s name, for those few seconds, had ended up being sweetcorn. And second by second reality existed, and wireless connections failed to interfere.
ALMF 