Ben Highmore
2017
Where is There?
Where is there? Where are we? What is there, there? Are we on the edge of town, in amongst industrial estates, down the road from a budget hotel aimed at ‘executives’? Is this a place where the bus goes by only twice a day? Where everybody drives a silver sedan? When the writer Gertrude Stein returned to her childhood neighbourhood in Oakland, California, she found her semi-rural childhood home had been demolished and replaced with small businesses in what today we would call a business park. For her there was no ‘there’ there anymore: nothing to hold on to, to locate her within a history, to give place a sense of continuity. What was there was ‘anywhere’ USA, or now, ‘anywhere’ that could be anywhere and everywhere. It could be the offices for the TV series The Office (UK), the offices of Wernham Hogg Paper Merchants in Slough, twenty miles outside of London. Or it could be the offices for the TV series The Office (US), the offices of Dunder Mifflin Paper Company, Inc. of Scranton, Pennsylvania.
Building with steel, glass and sunlight
In a tale of four ‘friends’ who in 1964 are loosely gathered together in and around Newcastle, the TV drama Our Friends in the North paints a vivid picture of three decades of social and political history: of communities decimated by the closure of coal pits; of the rise and fall of opportunities for democratic socialism; of police corruption. And of course, as all good dramas do, it tells of love, of rivalry, of jealousy and generational misunderstandings. It has at its epicentre a block of houses built in the modernist idiom. At various points all four protagonists live there. We first meet the housing block as a utopian dream. In his plans for the future, the Labour leader of the council offer a vision of housing in the North East. He talks of building ‘high-quality, high-rise, apartment blocks, made from steel, glass and sunlight’ and claims that ‘together we can build a bonfire for decay, dereliction and despair’.
The housing in the series is ‘system built’ from a Scandinavian model. We are shown how it replaced a world of back-to-back slums, without proper facilities (plumbing, electricity), a world of overcrowded rooms, of decaying buildings, of damp and death. At first the blocks are a model of modern values: light, clean, hygienic, healthy. They are alive. A living, breathing future. Within a year or two, though, the apartments begin to decay, to develop mould, to suffer from condensation and lack of ventilation. Wallpaper starts to peel off the walls. Inhabitants develop coughs. It becomes the slum it set out to replace. Within a generation it gets blown to smithereens.
It is unusual for buildings to last a single generation. Yet Our Friends in the North sticks quite close to the cycles of fabrication and demolition that characterised significant areas of social housing in the middle of the postwar years. Outlying urban areas went from villages to densely populated urbanism and back to rubble strewn waste ground within twenty or thirty years. Our Friends in the North also stays fairly close to the real case of ‘Mr Newcastle’ – T. Dan Smith – who was leader of Newcastle City Council in the 1960s and sought to regenerate Newcastle through mass housing and civic building. The character of ‘John Edwards’ in the drama, who is the licensee of the Scandinavian housing ‘system’, is based on the architect John Poulson. Both T. Dan Smith and John Poulson were eventually sent to prison in the 1970s on fraud and bribery charges. What we see in Our Friends in the North is the way that corruption takes root and takes over. The councillor and the architect offer ‘incentive’ trips abroad to persuade other officials to vote in favour of their housing projects. ‘Bribery and corruption’, rather than ‘glass and sunlight’ turn out to the foundations for their housing projects. Of course, the majority of social housing from this period was not built on corruption. Most were built on dreams and sunlight. An architectural form gets tainted by implication, by association.
What are the social foundations for the built forms that we see in James Smith’s photographs? Are they built out of optimism for a better world? Out of sunlight and soap, out of boozy lunches and dress-down Fridays? Are they the architectural form of entrepreneurialism or of rental investment? What will happen to the built ‘world’ that James Smith photographs? Is he documenting a slowly disappearing social world? Or is he tracking something that is still emerging, something still spreading across brown field sites and town boundaries?
Glass
Like many people, I would guess, my understanding of glass was based on the sort of unchecked information that was often taught in school as simply facts. In the 1970s we learnt, for instance, that our tongues had various discrete areas that were sensitive to particular tastes and flavours. There was a flavoured geography to the tongue: turn left for sour receptors; straight ahead for saltiness. This turned out to be entirely erroneous. Looking back, I wonder how anyone fell for it. We learnt as well that glass was a liquid that could never quite become a solid, but was ‘caught’ in a highly viscous state as the result of being supercooled but was still basically a liquid. ‘Look’, we were told, ‘go and find a glass window from the eighteenth century and you will see that often the glass is thicker at the bottom than the top’. The window is slowly, very slowly, ‘pouring’ downwards, to the bottom of the window. Wait a million years or so and there will just be a puddle. You can’t perceive its liquidity because you are moving through the world too quickly: if you were a brick or a piece of metal and lived with a different sense of time, of duration, of temporality then maybe you would ‘see’ this.
Wikipedia tells another story. It calls glass a ‘non-crystalline amorphous solid’, that shares a similar atomic structure with supercooled liquids but ‘displays all the mechanical properties of a solid’. It is a solid. It just isn’t a liquid, supercooled or whatever. Properties trump structures. Ontology outdistances morphology. It is what it is. Not only that, but the idea of an eighteenth century window being thicker at the bottom was merely a convention of glaziers. When you rolled out glass in the era of fire and steam (rather than the era of computer calibrations) it was always uneven. There was always a thicker and thinner part. It made sense to fit the glass with the weightier, thicker end at the bottom. Gravity and all that.
Both stories are attractive. It is probably just as well that glass is a solid, and that it isn’t in the slightest bit runny. But I like the idea that materials have different temporalities (that gas and oil ‘knew’ dinosaur bones) and that we would be aware of the world’s different properties if only we could move through it within different time spans (with the life-span of a gnat and a rock). I like to think that the imperfections in the plate glass curtain walls in James Smith’s photographs, the imperfections that make a straight wall bend, that allow a rectangular window to bulge and balloon, are little glimpses of another order, another temporal dimension…
Living museums of the future
A fairly recent (especially seen from the timespan of a rock) addition to the form of the museum is the ‘living museum’. Weald and Downland Open Air Museum, near Chichester in West Sussex, for instance, consists of a number of relocated ‘exhibits’ from across Southern England (Sussex, Surrey, Hampshire, Kent). It first opened in 1970. It includes examples of domestic and civic buildings stretching across nearly a thousand years of history. They have all been lovingly restored and set in appropriate settings in the rolling grounds of the museum. The buildings that are included place the emphasis of the museum on rural life (watermill, village school, cattle shed, and so on). You wander across the grounds and come across a medieval Hall House, for instance, where forgotten crafts are being remembered. Two years later, in 1972, in County Durham, another living museum was opened. This was Beamish Museum where the focus was on the industrial revolution and the social and material forms it gave rise to. The timeline of the museum stretches from the mid-1820s to the 1940s, but it is about to be extended by another decade when it establishes an area called ‘1950s Town’. Beamish has cobbled streets and trams, it has pit villages and collieries. It is more urban than rural.
Suppose that the form of the ‘living museum’ continues, and that in four hundred years’ time an open air museum seeks to exhibit the life of the early part of the first century of the third millennium of the ‘common era’ (in other words, ‘now’). What would it include? What would it look like? Would they try and restore an old-IKEA out-of-town store? Would they spend ages trying to get the exact blue of IKEA’s giant shed? Would this museum set its buildings in various out-of-town situations: the business park, the retail park, the leisure park? Perhaps it would be called ‘There is no There, There: the park of the out-of-town park’. I imagine that it would need a huge amount of space for all those giant boxes of offices, of light engineering factories, of furniture villages. But it would also need space for the austerely decorative planting of hedges and trees and shrubs (but few flowers) that orchestrate these spaces, as if to say; ‘we are more than just functional space, we like nature too, just as long as it is easily managed and doesn’t inhibit vehicular access’. Perhaps they would include a shallow (health and safety compliable) pond or two, perhaps even a lake. And the museum would be held together by a tracery of access roads so that museum goers could easily navigate the grounds. In four hundred years’ time there won’t be cars, of course, but as an essential part of the museum experience you are driven around the exhibits in a silver sedan.
If the curators came across James Smith’s photographs they would have an inordinate amount of information to help them recreate our current moment in built form. They would get the sense of space, they would learn of the relationship between the built, the paved and the planted. Not only would they get a great sense of the detail of architecture and setting of these buildings, they would have an invaluable guide to their mood. Even in the middle of summer such places manage to hold onto the feel of late autumn. You can see the odd park bench (probably commandeered by smokers and vapers) held out as invitation to indulge in alfresco sandwich eating, but generally, these building expect the worst. Curators will use James Smith’s photographs to learn about authentic tagging (‘yes, back in 2016 graffiti was often quite dull, it wasn’t all Banksy you know’, says the knowing historian of the future), they will use his images of stained concrete to produce authentic effects of discolouration and tarnished surfaces. The patina of a time.
Unpeopled, stilled
From light sensitive chemicals to light sensitive electronic cells, the history of film, video and photography has always been a history of time and perception. For Walter Benjamin writing in the 1930s these technologies provided new ways of seeing the world. Film techniques could be used to slow down the world to the point where we are able to see what happens when a humming bird flaps its wings, when a droplet hits the surface of water, when a bullet pierces a melon. They can be used to speed up the world, so that we can see clouds rushing passed, shadows stretching out, and plants turning and folding. The still image could zoom-in on the world, showing us unseen structures, unperceived worlds.
Our sense of time was altered by film and photography. We could imagine a time-lapse film that would take hundreds of years to make. I met a man on a train once who planned to make just such a film. He would have to pass it on to subsequent generations to carry on with the task of making the film. And they would have to pass it on too. And on and on it would go. Instead of seeing a plant unfurl, for instance, we would be able to observe the natural history of a city as it ballooned, as it entered into a historical time beyond our predictions. Who would be able to see these films that required fixed cameras and would take a single frame of film every two weeks so that a year produced a second of film. In sixty years you had a minute of film, in six hundred years you had a ten-minute film. What would that film look like?
If film and video can slow-down time and speed it up, what can the still image do? In the 1920s and 30s an artisanal photographer called Eugène Atget was ‘discovered’ by young surrealists. They found his photographs uncanny. He documented various neighbourhoods in Paris, often concentrating on particular architectural details and interiors. He often sold his images to illustrators and to architectural restorers. He photographed for a precarious future, a future that needed tending to. Walter Benjamin thought that he photographed the city as though it were a crime scene. Benjamin also felt that all the documents of civilisation were also documents of barbarism. Not one without the other. You can see how the two ideas could come together. Every city is built on the backs of those who benefit least from its riches. Unless Atget was purposefully recording urban types (for instance he photographed urban gleaners – the chiffonniers or ragpickers of Paris) his photographs rarely include people. Sometimes you can see a ghostly apparition behind a window, but mostly the urban streets and domestic living rooms he photographed are unpeopled. Is this partly what led Benjamin to see them as crime scenes, as if they had a forensic coolness to them?
James Smith doesn’t photograph in the way that Atget did, but he effects some of the same moods and feelings. And yet there is something askew with Smith’s photographs. We are not quite sure what we are looking at. I am looking at a building. I am looking at another building as it is reflected in the smooth mirrored skin of that building. Between the one building that is all surface and the other building which is all form and solid, lies a space which is no space at all. It is the impossible space as it exists in a reflection. A space you can reach out and touch. It won’t hold a person, not really. Only a representation caught momentarily. But this impossible shallow depth only begins to describe the relationship between the building that stands in front of the camera and the one that stands behind the camera at an angle. We are thrown back in time, back to a different moment of production. The window grids aren’t just ‘there’ for the curtain wall of the building I’m facing. They are also the perspectival grid of the building that is reflected. They hold and bind both buildings into a relationship of one-point perspective. This insists on a diagrammatic quality for the buildings: they are themselves as plans, as designs. In one sense they never quite left the drawing board. They don’t quite sit in the landscape. But nor are they the floating solids of the best of modernist architecture. This is corporate modernism or middling modernism as James Donald once termed it. It isn’t anchored into the physical world because it is caught in its own abstraction. What gets ‘made’ in these buildings? Things? Or Contracts? The outside gives nothing away. It just throws you back. This is a transparency that hides and protects. A transparency of the secret.
Cluster forms
A small cluster of concrete forms assembles on some paving slabs. They congregate in pairs; two pairs of pairs. The taller of the couple appears to be an air vent of some form, suggesting a subterranean environment beneath the paving slabs. Underneath the paving slabs lies the boiler room. The concrete surface is graffitied. We are inside, looking out. The scale is hard to make out. Are they human scale? Suddenly I am caught by an anxiety that I can’t possibly justify. I mean, what are these triangular blocks to me? Why should I care one jot about them? But I am worried. I’m thrown into an uncertain future where these concrete shafts are cut adrift. They have become standing stones, as strange and unexplainable as the standing stone circle in Avebury. My hallucination is out of time. Or rather it is the time of ‘all that remains’, the time of found objects suspended in a sea of black.
BEN HIGHMORE is Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Sussex. His most recent books are Culture: Key Ideas in Media and Cultural Studies (2016) and The Great Indoors: At Home in the Modern British House (2014). His book The Art of Brutalism: Rescuing Hope from Catastrophe in 1950s Britain is forthcoming in 2017.