It´s ironic that we spend so much time building culture and yet cannot stand the result. A fully man made environment where every little object is perfectly cultivated, is, to most people, not considered to present the apex of comfort and well-being. It lacks life, we say, although we may see thousand upon thousand of our brothers and sisters meandering about on the concrete. Googling the words “concrete + desert” yields 2.670.000 hits (oct 31 2005). Ergo the success of the potted plant, the ubiquitousness of domesticated dogs, cats and a wide variety of cute rodents. It is as we are on the run; trying to escape rectilinear order, the very same geometry we ourselves impose on everything. Mans presence in otherwise natural surroundings is always advertised by things with straight edges, and rectangular form. Mans presence in city planned areas is evinced by organic forms.*
There´s an interesting image of the human condition: the propensity for performing straight edge environmental planning in combination with an itch to cover the resulting edifices with foliage, graffiti and junk. Thus the frustrating difference between an architect´s drawing and the completed, inhabited house. Never trust an architecture sketch that doesn´t contain ugly curtains, misplaced potted plants and a plethora of crap on proud display for embellishment or memento. Even though the activities of the inhabitants fuck up the best laid out plans, they still are manifestations of life. Omitting them in architecture depictions is like performing portraits solely of cadavers.
It sounds quite irrational; man battling the exclusively man-made, but this peculiarity is fertile soil for profound observations about man´s deep-seated duality. Alas, that falls outside the scope of this project, other than as a resonance, underpinning the images and texts (since I, the maker of the images and texts, is also human and therefore subject to human conditions, i.e. said duality).
This being a true duality makes the layer metaphor more complicated, since there is no true inner kernel consisting of hereditary properties with acquired qualities superimposed on it, but rather a stack of layers that are shifted depending on context. We are, for example, not natural beings with a thin coating of cultural varnish (a popular image), nor are we culture creatures with a stubble of bestial fur (a funny image). This reasoning doesn´t have to lead towards a post-modernist loss of the subject, though; we just have to accept that the “self” isn´t a definite object, but rather a set of parameters, I use the metaphor “layers”, because it´s the simplest way to handle multidimensional information, I doubt it would stand up to closer scrutiny. I use it for convenience, not for scientific or philosophical accuracy.
This convenient image of human persona building ends up in a bundle of transparent sheets that constantly is being shuffled to adequately meet the social or functional requirements of changing situations. I remember that, back in the seventies, people often referred to this as wearing multiple masks (“are we one face behind a thousand masks or are we a thousand faces behind one mask?”) in the era´s chase for Truth and Sincerity, soon to be followed by post modernism, doing away with the concept of a true face as such.
Since the layers that build a full personality are complicated by their transparency, resulting in a blurred and megasyntagmatic image, we prefer to allow prejudice or related forms of aquired stupidity render some layers opaque.
- The World
- The Picture
- Tabula Rasa
- Pinx.
- Logos
Culture, The Fig Leaf Layer Layer
Necessity is the mother of invention, but culture was begat by a penis sheath and a silly hat.
- Undercover
- Under a Hat
