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DAVID CARR-SMITH 2009
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DAVID CARR-SMITH - IMPROVISATION / DESIGN / ART / KITSCH / CHANCE
"HOME"
DEFINING
MY LOCATION / MY NEEDS / MYSELF VIA MASS-MARKET PRODUCTS & TASTE
INDEX
AN
ARTIST'S PUBLIC-SITE INSTALLATION WORKS
IMPROVISED
ARCHITECTURE IN AMSTERDAM INDUSTRIAL SQUATS & COLLECTIVES
IMPROVISED
OPEN-SITE: ("THE NOMADIC COMMUNITY GARDEN")
IMPROVISED
VILLAGES: (WANDSWORTH & KEW BRIDGE 'ECO VILLAGES')
ALLOTMENT
IMPROVISATIONS - PUBLIC, LEGAL, SOCIALLY INDORSED
TEMPORARY-ARCHITECTURE:
("FRANK'S CAFE" & "SOUTHWARK LIDO")
VERNACULAR
- PRAGMATISM & STYLE: (BERDUN VILLAGE BARNS & HOUSES)
"HOME"
- MY LOCATION VIA MASS-PRODUCTS & TASTE - LIV-RM
"HOME"
- MY LOCATION VIA MASS-PRODUCTS & TASTE - HOUSE
"HOME"
- MY LOCATION VIA PERSONAL CHOICES
ART
- GOTHIC INTO RENAISSANCE INTO EARLY 20thC
ART
- 20thC COLLAGE INTO MASS-MEDIA
GRAFFITI
INTO STREET-ART
KITSCH
CHANCE & DESIGN
.
.
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THE
BRITISH MASS-MARKET HOME - pt 1
...
in process
pt 1: "HOME"
- THE 'LIVING-ROOM'
pt
2: "HOME" -
THE HOUSE
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THE LIVING-ROOM
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LIVING-ROOM:
BEACH AT CRACKINGTON HAVEN (CORNWELL)
(pic c mid-1980s)
A
living-room's inaugural state of differentiation.
To claim a potentially controllable
portion of the world to inhabit - not to be 'lost' in formlessness (a
metaphysical being-state) or 'unprotected' by a 'second-skin' (an atavistic
fear) - is
surely an essential inherited desire.
These
two people (like most house buyers) are probably not the makers* of this moated
enclosure: a small portion of ubiquitous beach has been perceptually isolated and
awarded an identity (as 'a floor' or 'platform' or analogous intentional object)
simply by drawing around it with the most traditional of sand/seawater sculpting
tools - a small spade.
*Its
makers may be those in the background, engaged on a new project.
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.THE
MASS-TASTE 'LIVING-ROOM'
The
main example shown below is the living-room of my parents 'retirement cottage'
- subsequent examples are treated as variations of this exemple:
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THE ENSEMBLE:
The Living-Room is a focus of attempts to mediate (use, understand, placate)
existential conditions
- to Use - functionally relate to (engineering)
- to Understand - to 'model' (design)
- to Placate - to sublimate (kitsch)
The
traditional living-room is a very intimate and very absolute place, an experiential front-line between
'Me' and 'It'. An interface that actively filters and mediates interpretations of the 'external unknown', resolving stress.
The
examples below are 'neurotic' rather than assimilative, ensuring 'security'/'comfort' by
filtering perceptions via a surface of highly focussed signifiers of reassuring
aspects of the 'outside', reassuringly stereotyped (stereos = mass agreement).
The living-room's space (structure/content) is manifold. Many directions to 'outside'
branch from this junction, qualitatively different types of space meet here
(together these constitute 'experience'). It is an entrepot of different
dimensions/destinations that may be physical, or metaphysical, or mental.
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LIVING-ROOM (COTTAGE): W END
(pic 1983)
The
living room of a city couple in their country 'retirement' cottage.
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LIVING-ROOM (COTTAGE): W END
(pic 1985)
In
two years almost nothing has changed, apart from an updated tv a focus of
small activities is the mantelpiece to the left of its clock and its
adjoining shelves. The mantel's plant has vanished, its rose vase is
slightly changed, a porcelain figure has descended from the shelves, and a
photo has been added (making a balance of 3 items each side). On the shelves
there have been a few little changes (some perhaps initiated by dusting): a
text replaces the figure, a second family photo and a tiny ceramic pram have
been added. Also a plate has been fixed to the left wall.
The
1983 living room feels 'in use' - the photo was taken from a chair; the 1985
room seems 'intruded upon', in a state of 'readiness for use'.
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LIVING-ROOM (COTTAGE): EVENING: W
END
(pic winter 1987)
Another two
years has passed and the room has still hardly changed. There has been no change or expansion
of use beyond an augmentation of comfort, and indeed the signs for 'comfort': 1
a larger and more expensive fire emits not only physical infa-red (like the
previous machine) but placebo comfort via a model atavistic fire; 2 a new
seating 'suite' that looks more soft and plump than the old, more bed-like with
its hard legs hidden by a ruffle like a
'fitted bed-cover'. The main function of a
'living-room' seems to be physical comfort which
reduces/expunges awareness of body during passive consumption of mass-mediated
entertainment and a setting that signals relaxed and mutual endorsement and augmentation
of the rituals of sociality.
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LIVING-ROOM (COTTAGE): E END FIRE-PLACE
(pic 1991)
A
subsidiary 'set-piece' - a 'museum/store' of collected memory-evocative objects.
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LIVING-ROOM (COTTAGE): N SIDE
(pic 1991)
A subsidiary 'set-piece' - a
'museum/store' of collected memory-evocative objects (the clock was
kept functioning at some expense though supplanted by the mantelpiece clock -
see below).
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HEARTH & WINDOWS (physical):
The
hearth, central for body-need - however this vulgar need is sublimated into the
mental/memory space of 'ancestral-hearth': rustic stone (three cast-cement
parts!), electrically flaming logs, iron firedogs.
The
windows. These openings admit to the physical outside - the most external of
three 'layers': first the body, second the 'mentalcapsule' of the room, third this
'physical-infinity'. As this external 'chaos' approaches the room it becomes 'a
view' - it landscapes and then gardens itself; at the surface of entry mnemonic
filter-converters: diamond-panes and curtain-frames, pass light but process the
residual physical-actuality into fantasy-memories.
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LIVING-ROOM
(COTTAGE): W END HEARTH
(pic 1985)
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CLOCK (metaphysical):
At the center of the clock there is a non-dimensional start of
time; the hands accelerate outwards from this point of motion's entry, the issue
of all occurrences. A terrifying signaler of utter un-existence beyond the
surface of sight and of our identity's span of time! No wonder it is necessary
to sublimate and/or disguise such an opening!
This example
displays 'Roman' numerals on a brushedstainless face in a crafted-mahogany box. These meager reminders of property and schooling;
'modest-offerings-up' of 'responsibility'; 'solid good-quality workmanship' and
'knowledgeable good-taste' attempt to cajole, tame, flatter, dignify, educate and own(!) this terrible spatial
out/in leak, while
actually degrading perception of the phenomenon and diverting assimilation
into euphemism. (For celebration of the marvellous issue of time see pre-19C
clocks).
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LIVING-ROOM
(COTTAGE): W END
MANTLEPIECE CLOCK
(pic 1985)
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PICTURE (mental):
If one cannot face the vertigo of present physical space one may
mentally exit (out of ones hearth-warmed body) through this mental opening
in the center of the wall, into the sentiment of a safely selected past,
rendered with a reassuringly obvious 'authority' of skill. An 'Older England' -
'Land of the Free' (brushmarks) - "It used to be lovely to see them ploughing
with horses" (never mind the ploughman - heavy, muddy, boring, long
days of low paid labour). To the stereotype-tuned mindseye this picture is
a mnemonic cloud-mill.
Note
that the painting is 'mental' because this painter did not try to substantiate to himself a sensationally
present place, but with habitual (and thus contentless) skill rendered a
mind image. Indeed both the technique and subject are memory accumulated
'commonform' stereotypes distilled through many media. The result is not an experiential
gradient - it is retrospective and its subject cannot be resolved in (present) attention.
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LIVING-ROOM
(COTTAGE): W END
OVER-MANTLE PICTURE
(pic 1985)
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MASS-TASTE
' LIVING-ROOM' - TYPE
PERSISTENCE
The
ubiquitous reproduction of this domestic form seems both personal (EG 1 - a
change of house type provokes conservatism rather than adaptation) and socially ubiquitous
(EG 2 - the same form is presented as a social mass-meaning in public 'domestic'
venues - hotels, etc).
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EG-1: LIVING-ROOM (COTTAGE): W END
(pic 1985)
The couple's retirement-cottage
living-room [as shown in 'THE
MASS-TASTE 'LIVING-ROOM'' above].
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EG-1: LIVING-ROOM (2: BUNGALOW)
(pic 1-12-1991)
Four years later and one of these persons is now living alone in a
different house. However all the previous living-room's
objects (even the carpet) now equip this new room. Apart from the new plug-in
fire this 'modern' centrally-heated home has no hearth, the biggest change is a sense of the
awkwardness of their relocation into this recently built and
more pragmatically chosen container - salvage of a room that cannot find
its natural form in this new space.
This is an attempt to continue and sustain
a familiar experience (begun long ago and probably most nearly matured in the previous home) by transplanting
the most portable of its mnemonic signifiers. Here
however their remembered
positions and their cozy groupings lack a focus and clash with an
unprecedented emptiness - both of life and a utilitarian container that is
bereft of any of the natural and historical continuity and enrichings of their previous location,
with which these objects had cooperated in conveyancing
a personal content-dream that
cushioned and sustained mere existence (the latter
signified so aptly by the unconsciously-expressed emptiness
of this new box-like room) - that
included their 'traditional' arrangement (the
forms of a customary behavior that is
not only personal but also socially endorsed), memories of the context of their acquisition
and the meanings of their styles.
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EG-1: LIVING-ROOM
(2: BUNGALOW): FIRE
(pic 10-92)
The
signifier "Hearth/Fire" [ref 'HEARTH' below] has here become so
attenuated as to resemble a 'working-model', a sort of 'doll-fire'; just
'another piece of furniture' (but of mysterious functionality!) in the room
rather than an integral structural focus of the room (indeed of a whole house).
This furniture-like incarnation has stripped this signifier of all its
atavistic depth (its
'permanence' as a physical focus of human existence) and
become a trite and silly, pretentious if not so negligible, ridiculously
dressed up version of a simple machine for delivering warmth (which might - if severely practical - have made a
small reconciliation with its brutal room-box).
Its
'designer' seems to have been somewhat aware of its furniture-likeness. Having
decided to pretend that its infrared tubes and their protective grill could serve
as the front of an 18thC log-burning grate s/he seems in doubt as to what a
'free-standing fireplace' might resemble. Its modelling is
muddled with references (nb: its little legs) to free-standing furniture objects
like 'cupboard/table' or 'display-cabinet'. Trapping a fire in a polished wooden cabinet
seems even
more bizarre than encasing a tv; it stimulates exotic analogues such as a museum
display-case presenting the astonishing survival of a fully charged 18thC grate
or a reliquary displaying the very logs that burned a saint. The inadequately
researched or minimally stereotyped style-motifs of a certain type of vague and
hesitant kitsch automatically act as phantasmagoric stimulants in a brain
evolved with an imperative to interpret signs!
....add
text : white log ! to redeem & identify the 'heap of mud
'!
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EG-2: GUESTHOUSE LIVING-ROOM:
"SEAGULLS", ST IVES, CORNWELL
(pic 7-6-1999)
The 'living-room' form
shown previously is surprisingly persistent and ubiquitous -
here it is in a small private 'Bed and Breakfast', presented to guests as if the archetypical shrine of
comfort.
All
the signifiers noted in the previous example are present; some in alternative
guise, for instance the centered mirror. A mirror is the most common substitute for an over-mantel
picture - it signifies an
infinitisation of the room, endorsing it just as a picture endows its subject with an
'eternal form'.
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EG-2: GUESTHOUSE
BREAKFAST-ROOM:
"SEAGULLS", ST IVES, CORNWELL
(pic 7-6-1999)
At
its inner end the 'B&B' guests' 'living-room' transmutes into their 'breakfast-room'. A similar
form to the 1st example (my parents' cottage) whose living-room
had a semi-defined space at its inner end for an 'antique' dining table and chairs
[no pic] - a 'formal' facility only for guests, family ate in the kitchen!
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EG-3: HIRED
TERRACE-COTTAGE LIVING-ROOM:
"THIMBLE COTTAGE", GILSTEAD LANE, BINGLEY, N.YORKSHIRE
(pic 13-01-2009)
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EG-3: HIRED
TERRACE-COTTAGE LIVING-ROOM:
"THIMBLE COTTAGE", GILSTEAD LANE, BINGLEY, N.YORKSHIRE
(pic 13-01-2009)
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EG-3: HIRED
TERRACE-COTTAGE LIVING-ROOM:
"THIMBLE COTTAGE", GILSTEAD LANE, BINGLEY, N.YORKSHIRE
(pic 13-01-2009)
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^ Top
> "HOME" - pt 2:
HOUSE >
> Next Section >
INDEX
AN
ARTIST'S PUBLIC-SITE INSTALLATION WORKS
IMPROVISED
ARCHITECTURE IN AMSTERDAM INDUSTRIAL SQUATS & COLLECTIVES
IMPROVISED
OPEN-SITE: ("THE NOMADIC COMMUNITY GARDEN")
IMPROVISED
VILLAGES: (WANDSWORTH & KEW BRIDGE 'ECO VILLAGES')
ALLOTMENT
IMPROVISATIONS - PUBLIC, LEGAL, SOCIALLY INDORSED
TEMPORARY-ARCHITECTURE:
("FRANK'S CAFE" & "SOUTHWARK LIDO")
VERNACULAR
- PRAGMATISM & STYLE: (BERDUN VILLAGE BARNS & HOUSES)
"HOME"
- MY LOCATION VIA MASS-PRODUCTS & TASTE - LIV-RM
"HOME"
- MY LOCATION VIA MASS-PRODUCTS & TASTE - HOUSE
"HOME"
- MY LOCATION VIA PERSONAL CHOICES
ART
- GOTHIC INTO RENAISSANCE INTO EARLY 20thC
ART
- 20thC COLLAGE INTO MASS-MEDIA
GRAFFITI
INTO STREET-ART
KITSCH
CHANCE & DESIGN
.
.