In recent researches I have made about Ethnography, I read that it is important to “recognize the human capacity to spin, twist, turn, invent, tangle, tear and live by, through, and between symbolic meanings” [Doing Anthropology in Consumer Research by Patricia L. Sunderland and Rita M. Denny]. Cultural symbols and signs used in things such as language, media and advertisement are dynamic, in constant negotiation. We would be merely executors of cultural conventions if we didn’t constantly alter, reassemble cultural symbols and practices at our own convenience. Yet, they are the only means by which we can comprehend this world and communicate our thoughts. We are thus living a paradoxical relationship with culture, at the same time restrictive and liberating.
What is the role of corporations and consumer research in this relationship? Consumer research is culturally agnostic, it doesn’t defend anything else than the interests of its commissioners, that is their financial return on investment, most often achieved by pleasing their customers. It is these customers who are arbitrating on cultural symbols and practices, not corporations that are merely playing with cultural meanings at their own risk. The book Ethnography for marketers (a guide to consumer immersion, by Hy Mariampolski) defines the techniques now widely applied in corporations to better understand their customers. Better the customers are understood, better the services they get, better are also the intangible benefits they get from brands and marketing campaigns (such as being able to identify with a brand, use it as a symbol of belonging to a group). But as I explained in a recent lecture about the heterotopia of Walt Disney World, the risk is that cultural assets valuable in the mediation of our reality, but less attractive for brands, could slowly fade away in the profit of less effective meaning systems, more in tune with consumerism and manufactured consumer lifestyles. By observing customers instead of people, customer researches are influencing our perception of existence. It is a little like quantum theory, you cannot observe something in culture without influencing it. The issue is not commerce and its consumer persona, but the lack of other narrative forces. Or maybe even worst, it is the incapacity to recognize the significance of other systems of meaning simultaneously at play in our lives.
Nice video about a virtual building in Second Life called ‘Alexander Beach’. It was built as a place of gathering for students of the Princeton University. Looking at the forms of the building, very similar to what you can find in the state of the art architecture of the real world (e.g. on WAN), I wonder which universe inspires the other. Today’s architecture constantly pushes the limits of the possible, inventing more and more improbable forms, disequilibrated, liberated from natural laws. On the other hand, Alexander Beach has this organic shape inspired by nature, like in many new buildings. The two extreme influences, sort of ‘virtual anti-gravity’ and ‘earthly organism’, are paradoxically married harmoniously in contemporary architecture.
I love big fairs like the Frieze Art Fair in London. You don’t need to concentrate and to try understanding any piece of art, as you do when you walked a long way to see 5 objects in a remote art gallery, frustrated to not see the obvious beauty in them. No, in the Frieze Art Fair, you just need to give an average concentration spam of half a second per art work, until one is catching your attention. Anyone can find his art, his theme, his interpretation at the Frieze Art Fair. Artists are just useful to provide enough diversity so that every customer can feel happy about himself. It might sound bad, but actually the process is quite enriching. The randomness of stopping in front of one canvas instead of another makes you discover new artists you have never considered before. And you can learn more about their complicated life and theories later, in art magazines and super intellectual galleries who will teach you why you should like their work and why they are superior to average humans.
Here is the stuff that caught my attention this year.
Ok, new media art seems out of fashion this year and this work is not even at the Frieze Art Fair, just in the Pavilion of Art and Design annexe event. But the piece is brilliantly executed and the way you see yourself in the ‘pixels’ when you move is very smart.
The canvases by Erwin Wurm were original and lead to interesting questions. (picture from Frieze 2008, but it’s more or less the same)
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See here plenty of beautiful and poetic paintings by Aya Takano.
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Congratulations to the curators of the greengrassi and Maureen Paley galleries. They managed to make me stop walking for a while with their sensitive selection of art works.
Here is a picture of the artificial traffic jam created by Maider López in 2005 (website, original article).
It should remind Week End (Jean-Luc Godard, 1967) to anyone who has seen the movie. Here is a clip.
When in a millennia people will try to understand how the end of the 20th century was like, I hope they will look at these. The images of a traffic jam in the countryside represent in my opinion so well this era: lost in some chimeras, consumerist, short sighted, ‘free’ to do the same than anyone else. It seems there was much more than that in the 60s. Traffic jams were also the symbol of social progress. Public holidays were not that new and most people could afford to travel thanks to their new car. But as Jean-Luc Godard illustrates in his movie, cars didn’t mean the end of conflicts between social classes. And most of the illusions from the 60s are now gone.
I see these images as part of history. I don’t feel much personal attachment to them. Nonetheless, they are still part of today’s world. The car culture is still contemporary. Why is it still there?
