“As a a child I played in the gaps between buildings, ruins of buildings, fallow land, abandoned industrial areas, gravel pits and sand mines. Formed through misplanning, they were our empire, the empire of children.
Ours was a dirty, unused place, with snakes, lizards, insects of every category and wild vegetation.
Children instinctively understand the language of natural vegetation. They can read it, if only they’re allowed to climb the fence and play undisturbed.
But the city gardeners arrive – the eliminators of mystery, the killers of the empty spaces. They mow, pave and plant in zones where children and teenagers once played.
They pave the paths people may walk upon and prohibit walking upon the grass. The grass is always framed with perfectly composed borders and the flowers are always placed in identical pots of cement.
Naturalness is understood as the annihilation of spontaneity through perfect gardening”.
This book raises the questions of the power of the visual, and the politics of space. Whose space, and whose visuals, and is it a democracy or something less than that. Most networks won’t take advertisements who offer the idea of not consuming anything, or that some of our consumption might be wasteful. The lack of hope, or difficulty in hoping, in design as a left wing activity : now seen as merely the tool of commerce:
“In the struggle between commerce and culture, commerce has triumphed and the war is over” : Milton Glaser.
is covered here in some depth and passion. Essentially the book asks, through a mostly visual language that’s quite provocative at times, important questions about the state of the world today: whether it’s a global state of commerce or whether its possible for it to be other than that, whether all the space has to be owned and regimented commercially. It references alternative ideas and movements, such as larger scale ones like Reclaim the Streets and smaller ones that can be just as effective, such as moving the electricity meters out of the cupboard and into somewhere visible, so that you can see how much the meters spinning when you leave the house, and thus how much energy you’re wasting.
In short a stunning extended visual essay on the perils of global hypercapitalism, possible reactions to this, and an impassioned and at times provocative plea for something else. This does not really do justice to the impact of many of the pictures within the book, ranging from the cut and paste political hits ( ‘cognitive dissonance’ ) to beautiful landscapes.
On a slightly tangential tip, Alice Stepanek and Steven Maslin have an exhibition on in Paris, starting on the 8th September and running to the 29th, at the Galerie Jean-Luc & Takako Richard. I include it here as its on a similar theme in some ways, about how the worlds been commercialised. They approach their subject via some eiree oil paintings of landscapes.
http://www.galerierichard.com/
http://adbusters.org/blogs/Communication_Arts_on_Design_Anarchy.html
https://secure.adbusters.org/orders/designanarchy/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalle_Lasn
http://benguiver.blogspot.com/
http://brainwash.robertundhorst.de/uncategorized/guerilla-buzz-virales-marketing-adbusters/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AdBusters
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