MadeScapes and all that part2
All is surface, but surface is not all.
A review by Trevor Smith
A review by Trevor Smith
System History
Redcliffe Street, Bristol. Sept 2011.
Redcliffe Street, Bristol. Sept 2011.
The urbanization of humanity is a story as old as civilisation itself. Between 1801 and 2001 the portion of the world population living in built-up areas rose from 3% to 47%. Now, for the first time in history, over half of all the human beings on the planet live in an urban landscape; in the UK that figure is projected to reach 92% by 2030.
In these urban environments our experiences, expectations and aspirations are born, fostered, and, sometimes, realised.
The need for year-on-year consistency of landscape and location, coupled with some of mankind’s more pressing non-biological dilemmas – strength in numbers, economy of travel and fortification – literally gave rise to the city. Over the centuries the cities grew; some were abandoned, some burned and were rebuilt; the majority of them evolved to cope with the demands of an ever-growing urban population. As alleyways became carriageways, wattle and daub gave way to brick, concrete and glass, and the tangled mesh of medieval cobbled streets became pedestrianized; usurped by the wide boulevards of the modern mega-cities, where forty-storey monoliths of ‘machines for living in’ answered the problem of surface over-crowding by reaching ever-upwards, in search of affordable living space. The city now evolves to answer questions of a different nature: questions of administration, commercialisation and the further commodification of the time and space of its citizens. Such planning is written in concrete and signed in neon.
System History is premised upon this very idea; the organic forms and milky night-skies of the pre-industrial world have been glossed-over. Lines upon lines of clean, cold concrete dominate the landscape, their impressions traced out into the night by strip-lights and neon-signage. The modern cityscape described bySystem History is the neo-natural. It is the latest and most vivid manifestation of the attempt to accommodate the requirements of the great project of humanity.
So successful is the idea of the city that its blueprint has been reproduced, with minor adjustments allowing for cultural variation, across the globe. Such difference in detail belies the familiarity of the layout – the city is stamped out of a standard model, re-designed to encourage consumerism and commerce – as citizens we are as ofay with the rhythms and nuances of the urban landscape as our ancestors were with its rural counterpart. We still, in the main, work by day and rest and play by night, but it is no longer the campfire that keeps us warm, protects us from the unknown and mesmerises us; now these duties are informed and performed by the familiar primary colours of advertising billboards and roadside neon.
System History understands this. It is in the loop; part of the feedback. The main piece, a twelve-foot high, free-standing billboard like the ones you see by the side of the interstate in films that show the vastness of America, fills the double-heighted room. Projected onto it, from the mezzanine, is a pulsating vision that feeds on its immediate surroundings and regurgitates them as an ever-decreasing/increasing series of shapes and colours. Rectangles and squares dance around one another, occasionally invading and overlapping each other’s space. They grow and shrink, emerge and fade while new images replace them, appearing almost in their shadows, as the world turns, they never skip a beat. In the real, analogue world, things are not as clear cut as on and off, and while this creation is entirely digital, inspired by only faint memories of the tangible, Will Kendrick has achieved something entirely analogue in appearance. These images have not been designed to look as they do, they are compositions let loose, to find their own way. This is a process that comes to life when it is left to go about its business, like the neon city outside, they are ever-present.
This exhibition is both a product and a part of its environment in equal measure, it slots in neatly alongside a terrace of empty shops and thriving fast-food joints. The terrace supports a towering apartment block, the view from whose windows displays more of the same: Bristol and its glowing suburbs. It fits in almost too well, as most passers-by don’t give the exhibition a second look. Some of the more curious ones wander in; a teenage drunk asks, ‘is it porn?’, and I want to shout, ‘Well, kind of.’
The projection on the billboard, like the signs of the shops and the traffic lights beyond, succeed in pulling you in and ensuring you never drop your gaze. There is a sense of it being half-created and half-evolved, like the city I drove through to get here it feels like a looped film, rolling past block after block of empty units, kebab shops and tower-blocks. Although it feels like I’m seeing the same thing over and over, I can’t honestly say it’s the case, so I stick around: whatever is on that billboard, I want to see it.
The fact that the main piece in the show is a projected flash file reproduces the emptiness behind the premise of the modern cityscape. Turn off the power and it’s all just wood, brick, metal and glass. Those are the real surfaces of the city, so empty are they that we fill the void with projections of something even more shallow; the ubiquitous imagery of advertising. Without the projection, there is no artefact.
The urban landscape is the neo-natural, but it is more complex than that. It is a neo-natural which is layered in artifice. It is not the urban environment that diverts and occupies the mind of the modern city-dweller, it is the imagery depicted upon its surfaces.
Lacan says that post-modern aspirations, built upon a world fixated with appearance and lacking in any real value, are reflective of that world, and as such are as shallow and as devoid of substance as the world in which they are built.
The idea that the city feeds and feeds on itself is reflected in the billboard piece as it records and plays itself back, leaving traces of its former manifestation to mess with its ever-changing form.
System History brings together artists who have considered the position of humanity from within these urban landscapes, yet the success of the show is its inhumanity. It is this that it renders it – on the surface at any rate – as anonymous as the rest of the shop-fronts on any street, in any city.
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