I'm With The Brand: Facebook

To skate through it really quickly - some of the oldest brands on the market - Brillo, immortalised by Warhol, Cadbury... Coca Cola... and if you look at the history of Coca Cola packaging - where the original design for the bottle came from - and where it is today - iconic, nostalgic... sexy.

Here's sexy: Rabbit, Jeff Koons, 1986.

Koons work is recognised as playful, ironic, slick, idealistic, perfectionistic, untouched by human hand. The object has clear sharp outlines: what we are actually looking at is a warped representation of ourselves - a reflection, standing in front of the object. Why a rabbit? Small cute fluffy animals, known for liking carrots - he's said that already: and for reproducing themselves as fast as bacteria with the pleasure of the open countryside, not a petri dish, which he has left unsaid. Koon's idea of fun? 

Metamorphosis of Narcissus, 1937, Dali

Koons is the ultimately powerful, glamorous business man, married to La Cicciolina, and runs his studio like a BMW factory. Art and business - art as business, the art of business, the business of art - and how he does it - that one is worth going to the pub and debating about for a few hours, more than a few pints, and possibly having a heated debate in an effort to seal the deal on any conclusions and standpoints at the end of the evening - Koons is that heretical, powerful, and flying in the face of artistic ideals that a brawl could be a likely outcome. Damien Hirst does the same; this debate much more visible to us in the press, a UK YBA. Hirst delivers scandal, outrage, hedonism and... perfection. Not mirrored, but no less a reflection of ourselves: mortal, gluttonous, the thirst for ownership; intensely narcissistic.

Artists deliver "experience". Dali tells us, in his perfectionistic, detailed technique, exactly what he is thinking. It exists without anyone having to look at it. A statement made along time ago, and now, thankfully, contemporary art explores the relationship between the image/object and the viewer, and Koons' Rabbit was a fore-runner. Koons as brand: branding is "the promise of an experience". Not the promise of an object, or a function, but an experience. Not: what is is, or what it does, but what it feels like. Historically, packaging was really all about promoting the product, and ensuring that the product wasn't tampered with - that premise hasn't changed, and is now enhanced with branding. Artists (Duchamp, thank you) teach us something useful: the name is the brand, and designers have understood this premise and laughed all the way to the bank. So: a sealed, branded package, guaranteed to have left the manufacturer and into your home in it's same pristine state.

And so it is with Facebook - the pristine package, the brand, the pristine interface. It dawned on me that I've never seen any variation, any deviation of a Facebook page. They re-organised the profile page, apps come and go - as Michael J Sandel so eloquently pointed out in his series: Justice 101 Harvard lecture series: Utilitarianism is what is best for most, but does it deprive the individual? I use a lot of user-friendly interface platforms, and here on Blogger, the design options and CSS/HTML openness means I can personalise my public persona ... within the design template set out by Blogger. That's a good thing, right?

we love a spoof...

Does Facebook enable the individual? Facebook has 500 million active users. Facebook (not Ltd, not .com, not Inc., just... Facebook, the singularity of the name coming from the weight of the art world) are sending out the clear signal, globally, that they cannot be hacked into, permutated, changed, messed about with, altered in any way, shape or form. Facebook is that innocuous sky blue... and a font that no-one can find online. Simple, effective, and more secure than the Pentagon. Facebook users are very vocal in their privacy concerns, and it seems that slowly facebook are drawing the strings tighter and tighter on privacy, and for those of us very well versed, the settings are there. Utilitarianism in action, a philosophical, moral, political ideal in action, right there on your iPhone.

But there's more: technology is change, changes the way humans think, changing in response to the masses, and forever Facebook will be in a state of development, responsive to users needs and desires, but this is it: the anonymous font, the sky blue, the rigid format, the rules. In Facebook, that's the constant, the outline for which the reflection of 500 million, for whom daily life is anything but.

For the birds...

Sunday was a non-event, apart from the fact that my boiler bit the dust. No hot water, no heating - it reminded me of a friends boiler having expired, as she announced of another Sunday afternoon in the pub, and all the lads fell about laughing at the old boilers' boiler having packed up. It's one of those moments when, as a friend, you keep a straight face and excuse yourself to go to the bathroom to rid yourself of the bitten-down-on torrential laughter that is a cider-fulled haze... So, this Sunday is a lazy day - roll out of bed, with the specific aim of not achieving anything (which is a bit different to not doing anything) so, bolt the front door, turn off the phone, logoff all the incessant chatter that is facebook, forums, emails, IM and skype... and onto iPlayer: me and my iMac are one.

What a gem - well worth the browse: www.bbc.co.uk/filmnetwork/Turning - a stunning film; the use of birds as a metaphor: three older women visit a child and celebrate his birthday... the cinematography is gorgeous, the quality of surface of skin, clothes, feathers.. the characterization of these three women through the movement and inflection of birds... hypnotizing. African drumming evokes Alexander McCall Smiths writing and Karni & Sauls work has the same rapturous honesty and mystery. For more on these magicians: www.sulkybunny.com.

Well over a year ago, I started making books from old love letters. In the process of moving away from home, I had asked my mother for advice as to what I should do with them: piles of letters, envelopes, cards, bits of ribbons, pressed flowers, tucked away, bundled up. She said that she was sorry that she had thrown out letters some years previously, and maybe I should just hang onto them. I've been making books for a few years now, and it seemed to me that making books from my old love letters would bind them shut for ever, and immortalise the contents into a romantic memory. So, I set about with a rivet gun, a drill, and started work. 18 months later, I'm still making them. That's not to say I have a dumper truck of the things - we're talking pre-internet Ireland where technological and geographical constraints meant that putting pen to paper was sometimes a good option. Still, I value the written word today even more - the implications of committing to text is not to be underestimated. 

To display these love-letter books in a birdcage, or a parrot cage - an aviary, could lend the idea that these bookbirds were each a little life, with their own markings, feather constructions, spines. These books started to take on some of the attributes of birds; now I think very carefully about what kind of bird the book shall take the form of. I also like the irony: it's cruel to imprison any animal; endangered species need to be protected; stuffed birds were once a way of showing off the wealth of the hunting-fishing-gaming landed gentry. Actually, stuffed birds - animals generally, were presented in glass cases for educational value; Darwins' wiki/On_the_Origin_of_Species was published in 1859, and in the light of this, many animals were stuffed in the name of exploring the minute permutations in the same breed, the birth of genetics as a scientific discipline, and with birds having a high reproduction rate and snappy life cycle, what better animal? Taxidermy is still alive and kicking in the Fine Art market today: www.dontpaniconline.com/polly-morgan whose work is as prepossessingly evocative as nature intended. The robin, above, was owned by Courtney Love. Morgan gives a visual and emotional language as strikingly beautiful as Rebecca Horns' kinetic sculptures: Der Zwilling des Raben (The Twin of the Crow), 1997, blogged about by vvoi , a blogger based in Warsaw: new-art.blogspot.com - check him out.

Teniers, The Archduke Leopolds Gallery, 1651

I live in a very male-dominated world, by choice, and my birdiness is something that I'm reminded of regularly; another story. So are all the relationships behind the love letters, but here's an exceptional one: hell hath no fury as a woman scorned. Jonathan Jones gave a lite review of Sophie Calle at the Whitechapel, 2009. Calle had received a Dear John via email (yes, insult to injury), and took action in a way only a woman can: she sent it to all her friends. Friends? These women from whom she illicited? invited? responses - anthropologists, linguist, dancers, feminists, psychoanalysts - learned women eminent in their fields, and she asked them to examine the email. The ensuing responses were framed, glass-cased, filmed; immaculately presented on plinths, wall-mounted; and these reached far up the walls, which must be 20 ft high in the Whitechapel Gallery, giving a similar visual impression that Teniers creates; in Teniers', there are recognisable paintings from Rubens, Titian, Raphael, amongst others; like the Archduke, Calle lines her walls with her big guns. Each response to Calle's email - whether it's transposed into music, painting, dance, a report: each viewpoint slowly flays this man, his written word dissected, probed, analysed. That man had nowhere to hide as his person, through this email, was dismantled and left as the only ghost in the room. Hell hath no further joy than the cold fury, the exquisite pain, the emotional removal of a thousand splinters. I was gobsmacked. 

Twitter to that!!!

Swallow

Nick Kershaw is giving his riffs - an '80s throwback, and I'm zooming down the A12, a road forsaken by the pantheon of Gods, trying to air-guitar Kershaw's track, because the radio won't pick up anything else in that part of the country and it's all a bit depressing. It reminded me of an ex-boyfriend, and at that moment, I missed him, but it didn't last long, thankfully, and I went back to my normal state of being glad we have gone our separate ways.

I was amazed at this pang - what, exactly was I missing? Possibly his spontaneity, his sense of fun, his boundary-less perception of the world? That his child-like view of the world meant that it was still all out there, the world having as much appeal as it had the first day he opened his eyes. An unquenchable hunger - thirst - to reach out and grab what ever attracted his fleeting attention, even if it ripped the flesh from him.

I was also amazed at the sense of nostalgia that was hankered for around the table earlier in the evening. How they pined and crooned for bakelite, and wept with dismay at the anonymity of the the iPhone, and the general detriment of tactile sensuousness in today's electronic commodities. Out with rubberised phone jackets, in with gloss black, a touch of chrome. Desecration. Just What Is It That Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing? Richard Hamilton, 1956. Obviously as much a concern now as then - or more so in these post-apocalyptic days of green issues, ethically sourced organic food, global gold prices rocketing and flooding of Chinese imports. I rarely feel nostalgia, but for others, it's a state of continual yearning. Someone around the table had questioned this human need for objects - behind the consumerism, the leisure shopping, the snobbery of objects, the staving off of boredom, new toys and illusions of higher efficacy in the kitchen... just what is this addictive desire to own all this stuff?

Whatever it is, Reverend Billy doesn't agree. More factually, wiki/Reverend_Billy_and_the_Church_of_Life_After_Shopping is radically anti-consumerist, part of the wider field of wiki/Culture_jamming, where subversion and intervention of first world gluttonist tendencies are the order of the day, and don't we know it? Culture jamming is so much a part of our everyday lives: Banksy; for those of you who go way back... the Adidas logo being turned into a cannabis leaf 'Adinuf', or even the Ronald MacDonald scandal and the reinterpretation of this character. Whether it's visual art intervention, a political stance on serious social issues, or getting on your bicycle www.critical-mass... It's the silver bullet for consumerism. laurakeeble.com/down-the-aisle: She comments on High Church cultural values of our High Street and the irrevocable bond, the insatiable desire, that is consumerism (and we all thought it was sex, which is a submissive tool to the desire for ownership). She and Reverend Billy are singing off the same hymn sheet.

Around the table, we had been talking about Sudjic's 'The Language of Things', Reviewed by Julian Dibbell, in the Daily Telegraph, he also reviews alongside Walker's 'I'm With The Brand' (intended irony here, these link to Amazon). Dibbell points out Walkers' "murketing" as the space between seller and sold-to: the subversion (diversion, re-routing) of objects: he cites black youths in NY wearing Timberland boots "as a ghetto fashion statement", the intention of the original object lost through re-contextualisation and given new meaning. No more than foxes moving in inner city spaces; the destruction of the rain forests as MacDonalds provides food for the masses, turning the world into a dustbowl, it seems to me that Timberland becomes emblematic of all of this.

We're very familiar here in the UK with beltless youths walking around with their jeans hanging off their butts. I wonder how many of them realise that look was appropriated from inmates of the American jail system: your belt is taken off you in case you hang yourself; you lose weight, and your clothes start hanging from a frame that was once first-world-fed fois-gras plump. Or Tiffany&Co jewellery. Us ladies love that stuff - you're familiar with the chain and heart tag: 'I'm so rich I have my jewellery in a safety-deposit box, and I'll wear the security chain' as the status symbol. The irony that those who wear this stuff could never afford Tiffany leaves me confused as to whether I should laugh or cry. 

Subversion is a natural inclination: we hanker for the things we can't have, like the stereotype of a typist forever grooming her nails; bucking the system. Culture jamming by the individual voice and en mass, the power of the consumer is actually in telling the producer what their product really means by what use they put it to. I use my Tiffany to chain my worthless crock of a bicycle to the nearest lamppost, it's certainly strong enough to do the job and no-one can steal my freedom. That's design to me: even if the product does or doesn't fit the intended use, I'll use it for whatever I want; if the product doesn't say what I want it to about me, I'll change it till it does, but that's a fine art.

Now, where did I leave my handbag?

Shopping trolley - private or public place?

She and I are laughing about the gender difference in shopping - women tend to be discreet in their shopping, slipping the hair dye/tampons/chocolate beneath the bag of spinach and loaves of bread. Women, I don't think, stare as much at others shopping. He quips "When a man buys dog food and pasta shells, you know what's for dinner" Oh, the habits of male singledom should be a line not transgressed.

So, would you ever put your hand in someone else's shopping trolley? It's the kind of thing that happens by accident, all very embarrassing - but there's that shock moment when you think - is that my shopping?!!! Is the shopping trolley a private space in the public arena - the same mentality of the car-owner, who views his car with the same fondness (or maybe more) as his living room and his sofa. Or, her sofa. And drives around in his personal living-room, and views the ownership of whatever bit of road he happens to be occupying as his personal space too.

Our male friend resumed that men tend to buy food with petrol - bad stuff, like pork pies and crisps...Ginsters!!! The infidelity of a Ginsters Pasty, the incriminating flakes of pastry falling between the legs, to be brushed away hurriedly at the traffic lights... but that wasn't what we were talking about, really. It was Hirsts £50m disco ball www.guardian.co.uk/artblog/hirst, or "For The Love of God", 2007,  the Rock Star of all Vanitas, the ultimate in consumerism, which was where the coversation had started - this genre of reminding us that we can't take it with us to the next life. The question here on this mortal earth is, after Hirsts statement of the ultimate power to buy heaven on earth, where do we go from here? He has achieved the immortal. 

It certainly gives those road-hogging sods another view of ownership, and indeed, a marvelous transgression of discretion to show that display of wealth: to be disgusting, unfair, glamorous, powerful, wasteful, idiotic or idyllic... but for it to be a consumable in the open market gives it the appearance that it could be attainable. Unimaginable for the bloke driving around in his living room, and he can stick to the disco ball air freshener hanging from his rear-view.

Badly Fitting...

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