this post is going to be about not much... my head is a big white nothing at present. It reminds me of the state you can go into when you're on a plane and you look out the window and the sun takes hours to set as you drift through unknown time zones and look at endless golden horizons and eat aeroplane food and watch in flight movies.
"Dusseldorf, Flughaven II" Andreas Gursky, 1994
"Schipol" Andreas Gursky, 1994
"Desk Attendents" Andreas Gursky, 1982
I'm doing an art project at the moment to do with public housing estates so I've also been thinking about big brutalist architecture and how they repeat and multiply throughout the world and how much I like them. I think I just like sort of nothing and in-between spaces in general.
I also like shiny things
and moving things and speed and monumentalism...Oh dear maybe i'm a futurist
Is Karl Lagerfeld a futurist? Jeez look at this crazy fashion show..haha.
Anyway I started with the Gursky images because they suggest all the obvious references of strange nowhere contemporary spaces and the associations with communism and strange socialist housing experiments as well as capitalism, or post capitalism or whatever the fuck we're in at the moment. Malls and supermarkets and freeways and airports and "global" afflictions and "alienation" and consumerist societies and art in the age of mechanical reproduction and ahhhhh! Oh and I also remembered that whenever I get back to Australia I feel like I've come back to hell..a very bright, white, latte swilling hell..but hell all the same.
so its a comfort to me to remember these spaces are here as well. I get this nowhere feeling often in weird smelling, weird lighting institutionalised spaces and the built civic environment in general and you know, car parks and the like.. but you also get it in nature..Biodiversity can often look quite plain.. big swamps and wetlands and deserts. Anyway they're all these big beautiful blanks, where you can just pretend you're anywhere... nowhere. Its serene.
Andy Warhol described Edie Sedgwick as a "wonderful, beautiful blank" but you could just apply this to anyone, or anything really. (I was going to put a photo of Edie but decided to put Andy and his assistant/artist Ronnie Cutrone instead)
"The most beautiful thing in Tokyo is McDonalds
The most beautiful thing in Stockholm is McDonalds
The most beautiful thing in Florence is McDonalds
Peking and Moscow don't have anything beautiful yet"
(umm actually i think they may now Andy)
somewhere place, elsewhere space, never never land, forever land..
gee, you really are a beauty, aren't you?
