Archive for 2006
Recently, whilst reading the Sunday supplements I came across a holiday advertisement for Ontario with the by-line ‘The Towering Beauty of Ontario’ the accompanying photograph shows a benign public park with a trellis of trees supporting the skyline. The image, I presume, is meant to portray an iconoclastic representation of the modern city. But what attracted me to the photograph is how the skyline, although augmented with trees its vista clearly opens up to show Ontario’s communication tower. The ‘Communication Tower’ became a ubiquitous symbol of technological virility in the 1960s and 70s. Cities from Moscow to London erected these modern day obelisks. East Berlin, in particular, gave the west ‘the finger’ when it erected its 365m tower in 1969 (its observation platform swivels to this day).
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“Beautiful as the chance encounter, on an operating table, of a sewing machine and an umbrella.”
Comte de Lautreamont, Songs of Maldoror (1869)
For the Surrealists, the work of Lautreamont was an inspiration and this line, taken from one of his poems, captures the essence of surrealist thinking – their search for the marvelous – the surreal - the eureka moment?
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Sometimes the connections we make between different objects or events, in space and across time, seem wholly coincidental and circumstantial. As we move through the world, leaving trails of thoughts behind us, we accumulate a store of memories and loose associations that have emerged through contact with speech and things. Some connections just fall away and are lost forever, submerged under a host of privileged moments and pressing engagements. However other connections are merely dis-placed, sidelined by the same moments and engagements but preserved as a latent memory. The latter is merely put to one side in anticipation of future action, subsumed under the social schedule of work-and-play.
This is the story one such memory, first generated and then laid to rest at the conference Repositioning Graphic Design in October 2005. It was finally remembered – or recuperated - at the exhibition Albers and Moholy-Nagy: From the Bauhaus to the New World in June 2006.
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