Miscellaneous Gripes and Plugs
Proper posts this week will/may be about Black Box Recorder and the strange public school Stalinism of the 'Pylon poets' - although given the stony silence in my comments boxes of late I might need a bit of encouragement (one needs an audience, darling). So in the meantime, read these:
Entschwindet, excellent on the Architectural Association's attempts to justify its collective decamping to Dubai (Learning from Dubai, no less) with guff about 'critical' engagement. It would of course be preferable that some honesty and good faith were maintained and they produced straight-up oligarchitecture without claiming that they were undermining any (boo-hiss) Ideologies, reinscribing any narrativities or what have you, but the 'critical' gesture is a perfect example of what happens when Theory is marshalled by a group of practitioners who tend to need to earn a crust from the very dubious. Pioneered by Peter Eisenman and Oppositions in the 70s and 80s (when it had become obvious that the jobs were coming from stockbrokers and museums rather than local authorities and universities), the sleight of hand is to first denounce any 'moral' or 'ethical' position as 'humanist' or in cod-Althusserian, 'ideological'; and then define The Critical Practice of Architecture Itself as the only viable critical gesture. A pox on 'em.
Much of the above - and more! - will be found in my paper on the use and misuse of the term 'Functionalism' at the Historical Materialism conference at SOAS (that's in London, any non-Anglo readers) this weekend - where myself and I.T will also be showing Dziga Vertov's Soviet Toys and Enthusiasm, with Jonathan Beller as 'discussant', for the re-encouragement of any delegates made weary by a weekend of strenuous but invigorating Marxist discourse.
And a big 'OH YES.' is elicited by Simon on Bassline House, with which my acquaintance is brief, being a lickspittle Southerner - although what I've heard via Bat has been a damn sight more exciting than Dubstep's po-faced stoner torpor, albeit equally in hock to an 'ardcore-archivist tendency: What’s striking to me isn’t so much the North Will Rise Again/Nuum migrating beyond London thing, but the fact that what some people call “chav” is proven yet again to be the most fertile and vibe-generative sector of UK pop culture. Indie may be a white-out, but this is the forward sector, the class, that maintains the great British tradition of being plugged into black music and bringing something to it.
posted by owen hatherley at 10:50 am
6 Comments:
Ah, problematically, we both seem to be writing here as if the AA were a firm, and not a school.
On the one hand, it functions very much as a public school, through privilege and so on, and thus it also tends to produce a great number of 'names,' who go on to be significant in the field.
On the other hand, it could be argued that as an educational institution it has a duty of critique, whether or not that critique is followed through in practice. This argument would be similar to the one that revolves around Zizek et al...
"I might need a bit of encouragement (one needs an audience, darling)."
I meant to say: grrrrreat posts from you and Impostume on Withnail & I. Watched it again for the first time in many years, and saw much more in it, thanks to you(se).
Among much else, it's wonderfully well-acted. When Richard E. Grant is caught giving that false urine sample, the expression on his face is visible for less than a second, but it's surely one of the great moments in world cinema.
*thanks*
The AA might be a school, but it refuses to be merely a school in the pre-mid 20th c sense, i.e as a mere churner out of people with a particular training, saleable quality and propensity with the Orders - it has to have an accompanying theoretical self-justification. And that being this preposterous parody of 'engagement' and 'critique' is really particularly vile, particularly as it's a critique that (as Eisenman would no doubt have put it in cod-Derridean terms) put itself under erasure, in so doing abnegating any engagement with or critique of the status quo.
I'd rather they just dumped the Deleuze and went all Quinlan Terry or Terry Farrell, then at least the offensive self-delusional/self-exculpating tendencies would be absent. But the AA's Specialness rests on its alleged theoretical sophistication, which has to be maintained at all costs...
Yes to BB Recorder. Bring it on.
Maybe see you at HM although only arriving by 12 for my paper as getting up at 7am on Sunday is beyond my ancient creaking self. As for comments I would certainly have been leaving them if I could make any sense at the moment (insert usual gripe about overwork).
Thanks for the birthday message and intellectual engagement to come (someday)
yesssss.. me an dem pipettes been mashin up the bassline on the bus. luvvin it. brrrrapp. bb
Post a Comment
<< Home