This sums something up for me. I like Gormley’s work & I like people, but One And Other doesn’t seem to be either, just the usual insane undignified late Capitalist babel. Big Brother on a stilt. Why are “the people” always advertising something ? Are they aspiring to the condition of being a brand ? Is it a kind of exhibiting of stigmata ? & why, in the UK, are charity & exhibitionism so rigidly linked, or, rather, why is the former always pulled like an Ikea blind across the latter ? Is it a clinical condition ? Why am I increasingly reminded of the stunt culture, breathless social inanity & marathon dance contests of the 1920s & 30s ? Why do I have such a sense of foreboding about that ? Why is everyone in the UK trying to earn a living as a personal fitness advisor ? Will anyone just go & stand on the plinth for their hour & not do anything at all ? These are not, as far as I can see this morning, rhetorical questions.
actually I’m just completely fucked off & tired of it
Filed under outright politics, the postmodernised landscape
So glad you’ve said this. We are redundant again. That kept coming up yesterday. The next person who goes on the plinth for charity should be shot at. Not killed. Just shot at. So they hop up and down and yelp and leap from side to side and panic is created. Charities will be banned when I’m leader.
Hi Lara. Lovely to hear a sane voice.
I’d like to comfort myself with the idea of getting away from it all for a few days. Go to the hills, climb, let the moorland wind blow it all away, etc etc–
–except that everyone there will be personal fitness trainers, too. Every single piece of equipment, every pair of climbing shoes, will be a product dripping with Buy Me semiosis. Every group leader will have recently run a charity marathon dressed in a diving suit, leading a horse. Every member of every school group on every crag will be looking around every minute for a vox pop microphone into which they can parrot breathlessly, in a Cardiff accent, “It’s really exciting and you get to have a great time and test yourself to your limits,” or whatever wisdom they’ve received that morning from their Outdoor Educational Experience Marketer. Maybe they’ll get on the News! –ie that segment of Breakfast TV which has replaced the news & will soon run for 24 hours a day; which embarrasses even the presenters as they present it; & which is almost certainly described by some appalling piece of media jargon with which I never intend to become familiar.
Really, just fucking well let me out of here.
& another thing. When you go here–
http://tinyurl.com/mbkhwo
–& press go, the first thing you hear really is the sound of the brain: a Peugeot advertisement, with some nice energising flatter-your-life-experience pop music. What follows might be interesting if you could hear it over the sound of the presenter’s brain.
What I found interesting was that only the brain pattern from the schizophrenic actually sounded like music, minimalist counterpoint, while the sane brains sounded like someone trying out a new synth in a music shop.
Z, I’d have bet on it. I think you can take a course in trying out a new synth in a music shop now. I’m almost certain a personal music trainer can facilitate that for you.
I’m currently doing an evening course: “Walking into a guitar shop and avoiding catching the eye of the dude behind the counter just to show that y’re a pro and don’t need to do that polite human interaction thing anymore”. Once I’ve got my diploma I can put the word “tosser” at the end of my name.
Well at least, you know, it’s some sort of vocational training. & you could go on to teach others, perhaps professionally, perhaps even in Cardiff.
Yeah, I’d like to be dining outside of my comfort zone a little more because, you know, I’ve got drive and vision. Unfortunately Cardiff’s a hard nut to crack at the moment. Since the credit crunch the market’s full of tossers.
I’d like to see someone drop their pants on the plinth and start wanking off, just to know what would be done about it. And whose seminal eye catches it.
I bet you all feel a lot better now!
In fact, Mike, I think you should climb up there and enact your Recommended Fitness Programme for the over-sixties from a couple of weeks back.
… while Lara shoots at you and the enigmatic C takes pictures. I’ll organise a protest.
Contemplating the bones lying in wait beneath the flesh, biding their time, waiting to take revenge???
Sounds like a lot of people round here seriously need to get laid
So instead of giving us something we could be looking at, Gormley gives us Some People’s Attention.
I hate art.
…or The Opportunity To Pay Attention to Random People Who Were There All Along.
Which is worth even less.
Yeah. Very boring. Extended X-Factor auditions vs Britain’s Got Art Talent. In the future everyone’s gonna be famous for how long was it again? Can’t wait for the 2012 ‘Cultural Olympiad’.
over here in the land of self aggrandizing folk I’m laughing and laughing
this has just perfected my evening
I think julianr’s suggestion is wonderful..bullets, balls and oldies
Oh, woohoo! I blogged this the other day and was amazed at the number of comments that came in – I really think your title, “a dissenting voice” says it all. It’s like the new orthodoxy, we’re not even supposed to disagree…
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Hi Ms Baroque. I’m glad it was good for your stats–not so good, apparently, for Dave Hill’s over at the Guardian, see comment below yours… I think that’s probably the most failed attempt I’ve ever seen to scare up a controversy. Sorry, Dave.
Orthodoxy sets in quite fast nowadays. I guess I should have asked a couple of thousand other people what our opinion was before I said anything, but I just felt lazy.