It comprises a young tree, planted beside a basalt marker. The basalt was mined from volcanic vents near Kassel. The catalogue note for the piece explains the epic intentions of the seemingly simple work: ‘The combination of a living, growing tree with the immutable presence of stone is one individual’s response to the vulnerability of nature in the face of destructive progress.’
‘7,000 Oaks’ does exactly what it says on the tin, and is all the better for it.
Every view upon an age is bound to be a portrait of the viewer – a vista seen through the eyes of generational prejudice. Looking down from the apartment in Warrington Crescent, there was a feeling of being momentarily absent from one’s body, neither lost in thought nor quietly meditational, but drawn, somehow, down into the gusting rain and the darkness – a kind of emotional hypothermia, with memories taking the place of sleep.
Ian Devine, the former guitarist with punk progressives Ludus, hit mid-middle age towards the end of the Nineties, extolling both the Saga senior citizens’ magazine and the writings of the Australian historian, Greg Dening. It was Dening who wrote, ‘We make sense of the present in our consciousness of the past,’ and who advocated the writing of history in the present tense. Divine’s ultimate aim was ‘cultural disengagement’ – ‘I want to not know,’ he says, ‘who Hugh Grant is …’
TWO The Barbarism of the Self-reflecting Sign
The surface of the water in the plastic cup had been perfectly still just a second ago. Now, though, was it your imagination or tired eyes, or had the faintest ripple, a tiny freak outbreak of miniature choppiness, disturbed its earlier calm? In this light – iron-grey storm clouds pressing down, dusk falling fast – it was difficult to tell.
No – look! There it is again! That sudden shimmer on the surface of the water, as if someone were gently tapping the cup from underneath. A distinct jolt, like a kind of sonic boom reaction to some …
With claw prints the size of parking spaces, the Tyrannosaurus Rex slammed his way through the tense, electrical air of the lowering tropical storm. Hard in his sights was that gleaming symbol of contemporary urban person’s assertion of the backwoods-roaming, paragliding, authenticity-boosting, camp fire, free spirit, white-water lifestyle: an off-road 4×4 land cruiser – of the sort that could be seen almost any day of the week, being loaded with ciabatta croutons, bagged salad and Chilean Merlot outside any number of edge-city retail park, twenty-four-hour, thirty-two-checkout, Mothership supermarkets.
Back in the early 1990s, dinosaurs loved the Mothership. The blockbusting success of the raised-awareness action movie Jurassic Park had let loose its computer-generated cast of prehistoric monsters to endorse any number of pre-teen products with their rearing, charging, hissy-fit forms, as well as the film’s eye-catching dinosaur skeleton logo. Which was about as popular as popular culture can get. Cereals and lunch boxes, birthday cakes and pasta shapes – along the shining aisles of the Mothership the dinosaurs ruled again.
And, somehow, dinosaurs were right for the early 1990s. A creature whose brain was its smallest part was unlikely to be wounded by irony. Also, the movie considered the needs of its audience from every angle, thus pre-empting a confusion of intentionality: here, for instance, was a guy being plucked out of a portaloo and having his legs ripped off; on the other hand, here were lots of he-might-be-right-you-know Chaos Theory pronouncements, delivered with seductive fox-like elegance by leather-jacketed sexy scientist Jeff Goldblum. And then there was the eco-message, summed up in breathtaking long-shots of peaceful, pro-organic, Natural Shoe Store, liberal bourgeois vegetarian dinosaurs, grazing en famille on prairies of willowy waving prehistoric pampas grasses.
By the by, the film had introduced the hitherto underused term ‘cloning’ into the broader cultural discourse, which turned out to be absolutely on-the-button to define a general trend. As the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park had been cloned from preserved DNA to provide sensational infotainment – reactivating a history in suspension, so to speak – so many of the cultural products of the 1990s, from TV programmes to graphic design, would turn out to be cloned from, as it were, cultural DNA. Here was classic post-modernism in action – authorless signs transmitted through filters of meaning, brought to life in the labs of logo and cultural production.
Cultural cloning … now there was a thought. If you could just identify the most efficient little gobbets of an image or an idea – well, you could simply think of it as sampling, taking out the best bits and doing them like mad. Fads such as these were as old as the hills, of course (Hollywood cloning its stars, England its Beat groups) but the sheer extent of media in the 1990s – when the ‘mass’ in ‘mass media’ appeared to amplify a thousandfold on endlessly replicating channels, added to a burgeoning cultural conservatism – would make for an especially arid monoculture, based largely on promotability and marketing. The trick, for cultural practitioners, was to identify which of the principal species they were cloned from, and not try anything surprising. Culture could be led by market research, and very often was.
(Also, in the Nineties, the culture of superlatives demanded the most popular bits – the fondant centres, the strawberry cream, garlic butter – were simply lifted out of their context, so they became little more than a gooey mass. A diet of fondant centre …)
An example would be the extraordinary success of Helen Fielding’s romantic comedy, Bridget Jones’s Diary: the success of her idea was multi-cloned across fiction, film, advertising and print media, established as an entire demographic model and then used to sell the idea of Bridget Jonesness back to people who’d bought it in the first place. At the wallet end of marketing the proof of the cloning would be found in a multi-million-pound cosmetics promotion which offered ‘a Bridget Jones-style Diary’.
On terms such as these the idea of originality per se had become subordinate to the cloning process, and the baby dinosaurs crept out of their broken shells to rule the Earth again.
Cloned Media
Prior to the latest cloning boom in ‘zoo media’ (Chris Evans et al. to ‘The Girlie Show’) and ‘reality TV’, the process has perhaps reached its apotheosis with the phenomenal, pan-media, super-cloned success of Irvine Welsh’s novel Trainspotting. What began as a neo-realistic account of life and living death among Edinburgh drug addicts – couched in the vernacular tradition of James Kelman’s Booker Prize-winning novel, How Late It was, How Late – has become, by way of the movie, the soundtrack CD, the t-shirt and the advertising campaign, a form of media shorthand to signify Youth in general.
The greatest irony, perhaps, of this conversion of a novel into a free-floating logo for youthfulness was the appropriation of the orange and white graphics, made famous by the film of Trainspotting, to advertise the winter sale in French Connection’s chain of high street boutiques. There is a somewhat spooky connection between the desire to buy a ribbed brown cardigan and the need to identify, as a consumer, with the desperation of a heroin addict. And the proof of the cloning process would be inadvertently sealed by Sarah Champion, in her introduction to Disco Biscuits: New Fictions for the Chemical Generation, where she wrote, ‘we now have Trainspotting, the attitude’.
The cloning process, by converting issues and substance into the short-term safe harbour of provenly marketable ‘attitude’, has created a tendency within contemporary media – and even the broader span of contemporary culture – to fear any innovation that does not correspond to whatever attitude happens to be riding high. And at this point, cultural phenomena become merely vessels – the medium is the message, after all. Too true, Marshall!
Similarly, our decade-long love affair with mass retro-culture within the poppier packaging of
