antipopper

Went to the museum last weekend to see the Two Emperors exhibit, and to the art gallery this weekend just past to check out the Archibald Prize show. Two Emperors, which featured some fairly recently unearthed Qing and Han Dynasty artefacts from imperial tombs, was terribly designed and packaged — really unimaginatively put together. In some ways the film we managed to catch in the theatrette was more interesting, and this tells us a lot about the state of the exhibitionary complex — it has leaked out of the oldskool authoritarianisms of spectacular presence (“roll up, roll up!”), and into the spectacular distractions of more mobile media. But the doco was also so patronisingly racist — all these white men wax on (wax off) authoritatively about the quaintly superstitious Chinese. Lena wrote a very long complaint about the whole package in the guest book. I was so embarrassed — the pages were ruled for one comment per line, and she stood there intently, writing a page and a half of radical invective.

Oh: the exhibit, which touched interestingly on the State’s drive to territorialise space by violently standardising measurements, implements and uh, everything, reminded me that I’d lent Brian Massumi’s First and Last Emperors: The Absolute State and the Body of the Despot to a friend ten years ago, and never got it back. And I also remembered the whacky idea I had years ago for an exhibition of my own — The Entombed Warriors of Industrial Design, in which rather than having terracotta soldiers, you’d be presented with a tableau of terracotta spaceships of various fictive renown: the Enterprise, an Imperial Star Destroyer, etc, all rendered in unlikely detail. It’s a reference to those wonderfully physical prototyping processes that involve the sculpting of putty shapes that will eventually be reproduced in metal or plastic. The juxtaposition of the crafty and the illusive slickness of “technology”. Yhe craftily constructed army, designed in the past but from the future. (Physicality is great in design: you can CAD your way endlessly through the design of a motorbike in a computer, but someone eventually has to sit on a physical prototype to gauge how it feels. Introducing this early in the design process opens up a wonderful batch of feedback loops.)

This link between craft and virtuality brings to mind the best thing I saw at the art gallery, which wasn’t the stuff in the Archibald. (Which, BTW, was unbelievably crap all round — the only good thing was the portrait of Mr Squiggle. The show wasn’t even proudly reinscribing the reactionary aspects of painted portraiture; it was simply lame.) No, the coolest thing was a huge reproduction of an envelope for a library fine, about three metres tall and an apparently black and white image, but finely dithered in simulated RGB pixels. And every pixel was hand painted. Went with Claire, who has moved to Sydney and is sceptical of my capacity for artwank.