Epic Space

by Ian Martin

  So if someone could prove that a certain area of Hampshire, say, used to be a largeish settlement with satellite villages … Dusty nods approvingly and takes another swig of Monk’s Cock or whatever sad, bitter, signature brew it is he’s drinking.

  WEDNESDAY Strategy meeting with Flatwhite & Keenwagh. I mention Dusty’s ‘aboriginal precedent’ argument, and suggest hiring the sort of archaeologist who might find traces of a neolithic settlement underneath the proposed Gatsbys.

  THURSDAY They’ve duly appointed retired academic Sir Grenville Pumps, author of Ye Fulle Olde Englishe Break-Fast, or Whatte Ye Wille.

  It’s apparently a forgotten classic, this groaning four-volume treatise on how traces of Englishness can be found everywhere, even in neolithic settlements, and how traces of neolithic settlements can be found everywhere.

  Unusually, and usefully, Sir Grenville is on a zero-hours contract with a mysterious guaranteed lump sum performance bonus.

  FRIDAY Fuck me, that WAS quick. Pumps has found astonishing evidence of a thriving Stone Age community underneath our notional contemporary organic villages.

  Excellent. Now we have a unique opportunity to correct the mistakes of history. Informal Stone Age live-work spaces most certainly did NOT have to comply with building regs.

  SATURDAY Add little touches of specialness to the drawings. Compassionate weather. Classic car. Obedient dog. God, it could be a birthday card.

  SUNDAY Cross-platform media research in the recliner. Little Gatsby’s EVERYWHERE.

  ‘This is not simply the rr-ruff restoration of an ancient community …’ writes Bauhau the architectural dachshund in the Creative on Sunday. ‘It is a moral woof woof and archaeological yip improvement’. Give that dog a bone.

  May 30, 2013

  Ha Ha Ha You Fucking Ants

  MONDAY Excited to be curating this year’s Tamworth Popupalooza.

  It will be many things – an urban showcase, an indie artfest, a psychospatial experiment, a realtime craft fair, an intersectional delta, a global inreaching, a vertical thinkathon, a cultural boot sale, an actual boot sale, a celebration of biversity, a festival of affirmation, a carnival of tolerance, a network of beer-and-vinyl boutiques, the location of Britain’s Biggest Conga, free all-day cycling and The Great Community Gurn-Off.

  But Popupalooza is not just about fun. It has a grimmer purpose. It is about restoring Tamworth as the capital city of Britain. By bloody insurrection if necessary.

  TUESDAY One of the features of our psychospatial experiment will be a specially created model village, ‘Popuppingham’. All thatch and whitewash, smelling of cut grass and fresh laundry.

  It has been designed to feel exactly like a Leicestershire superhamlet, the sort of place high-earning professional people retreat to at weekends. We tireless campaigners, we Friends of Mercia, are simply making a point. ‘This is what we would have had within an hour’s commute of Tamworth’ we are saying, ‘if only it had retained capital city status.

  ‘Instead, the title Capital of England was wrenched from us by dastardly Winchester in the ninth century, only to be snatched from THEM by suave, double-crossing London in the eleventh. As a consequence, nearly every wanker in a pink shirt lives in the South …’ We are saying.

  These days, Tamworth’s notional commuter belt has one of the lowest densities of wankers in pink shirts in England. If there is anything positive to be taken from this underperformance it is that such people belong in London, along with unpleasant wealthy foreigners, war criminals and charity beatboxers.

  When Tamworth rises again (inevitable, given global warming and the success of Game of Thrones) we will develop an entirely new dress code for wankers. Let’s draw a line under the pink shirt and move forward.

  WEDNESDAY I’m with the rest of the judges in the secret judging marquee, shortlisting some architectural street food for Popupalooza.

  As is customary we pause every now and then to pull a ‘surprised’ face. Or squint uncertainly over glasses. Or laugh, gaily. A local string quartet is in the corner, playing generic pizzicato passages to keep us ‘in the mood’.

  We like the look of the architectural kebabs. Mechanically retrieved animal plasma dyed emerald green, shaped into little Monopoly houses, then skewered into terraces. New York ‘subways’ have edible signage; French versions with Art Nouveau stylings at either end. Impossible-to-eat deconstructivist ‘anti-pasties’. Ice cream cones in the shape of Shards. Exotic double-miniburgers with salad mezzanines.

  Oh LOTS of salads of course, this food is architectural. Rewilded salads. Green roof salads. Salads like miniature rain forests. All great to look at but you wouldn’t want to eat any of it. Never buy street food in Mercia, everyone knows that.

  THURSDAY Finalise arrangements for our ‘suburban beach’, a strip of sand with herbaceous borders and a big sign prohibiting ball games.

  FRIDAY A cloudmapped social happening such as Popupalooza would be incomplete without installations all over the place, challenging everyone’s perceptions of what a cloudmapped social happening is.

  There’s some properly challenging stuff lined up. ‘Ha Ha Ha You Fucking Ants’ is a powerful installation by artists Con and Connie Connaught: 42 flags on the roof of the cider tent, ‘each one a command to passers-by to think a bit more about things for a change’. Questions range from the provocative (‘What are you looking at?’) to the oblique (‘How many pixels in a daydream?’)

  Let’s hope it gets people thinking about how we can speed Mercian independence, crush the ancient kingdoms of Wessex and Anglia and reinstate Tamworth as the capital city, otherwise we risk getting a bit distracted.

  SATURDAY Approve the planted wheelbarrow display. We’re using only flowers, vegetables and weeds that flourished, along with Offa’s Tamworth kingdom, in the eighth century. Hogstink. Deathpansy. Witchsnot. Arse-fennel. Gripeweed. Bloodturnip. Shitgrass. Bubbling Gashwort.

  Happy days.

  SUNDAY Leisurely afternoon, reviewing Popupalooza progress reports in my eighth century Mercian recliner. It’s a reconstruction, fashioned from timber and clotted flax. Not very comfortable. But then the truth often hurts.

  I smile grimly to myself and sketch out plans for a flooded Milton Keynes. In the era of New Mercian hegemony it will become a wet playground, the ‘Venice of the Upper North-West South East’.

  June 6, 2013

  This Sorry Cabal of Pretension

  MONDAY In the morning, go about things in a traditional and non-innovative way. Get absolutely epiphanied at lunchtime. In the afternoon, adopt a much more contemporary approach.

  TUESDAY The secretary of state for entertainment, Tia Murrier, calls, asking me to help formulate guidelines for the arts community. I think.

  ‘Ian – the days of putting all our arts eggs in one basket? They are SO over. We must cut our cloth to suit our eggs. And tighten our eggbelt. Too many omelettes of failure have occurred in the past. Broken eggs. Broken dreams. THIS is the egg legacy bequeathed to us by a soft-boiled Labour party!

  ‘The times in which we find ourselves demand austerity egg management. The question we need to ask ourselves is not whether these eggs are nutritious, but whether we can afford eggs in the first place. Why should eggs even BE eggs? This is the age of toast, after all. Isn’t it? Yes, the arts community needs to wake up and smell the toast. And then ask themselves how the toaster might add value to bread, or something.

  ‘Forget the eggs for now, they’re just confusing things. Listen, the car’s waiting. Could you get something to me by close of business tomorrow? I’m giving a TED talk on Friday and to be honest I’m not sure eggs have got legs LOL. Bye. Byebyebye.’

  WEDNESDAY Tia worries too much. The creative professions are so foetally defensive at the moment, they’ll say whatever the government wants to hear even when the government isn’t listening to them.

  These days artists are so scared of making eye contact with potential patrons and possibly upsetting them that they’ve stopped going
to parties and mostly just stay at home digitising themselves.

  It’s the same with architects. They’re terrified of being bullied by the bigger, Tory kids. Being called ‘gay’ for revering beauty and harmony. So they lie. They lie through their teeth about how architecture’s greatest gift is to push up equity yields. Or they quack impenetrable guff about ‘meaning-making’, or ‘place-being’ or whatever the fuck it is this week.

  Every conversation that takes place within a creative profession – and I include ‘writing’ in this sorry cabal of pretension – is about money. It is predictable and profoundly depressing. Thank God my fixer, Rock Steady Eddie, takes care of all that stuff.

  THURSDAY Dedicate the whole day (total eight hours excluding lunch but including comfort breaks and triangulated thinking) to helping Tia.

  Firstly I send her an email telling her she’s doing a great job in very challenging circumstances. People love being told that, especially those who are paying you a fee. I also tell her she’s right to let go of the art/eggs analogy, it’s run its course. People who are paying you a fee love being told they’re right, too.

  By mid-afternoon I’ve formulated a three-point plan. To make myself appear cleverer, I pretend it was a five-point plan that I’ve ‘frugalised’ down.

  1. All arts – whether visual, plastic, performative or cross-platformed – must demonstrate how their deliverable artistic products will contribute to the economy. The geese of yesteryear, laying golden eggs of art everywhere, have been cooked. The days of ring-fenced funding for cultural development are over.

  2. As a matter of urgency all remaining artistic ring-fences must be located and properly audited in a national initiative, perhaps with the help of Radio 4 listeners.

  3. Following the audit, all artistic ring-fences to be broken up and used as cultural kindling, to fire the cultural boiler of our economic steam engine.

  FRIDAY Watch a livestream of Tia presenting my three-point plan. It seems to go quite well, apart from her confusing ring-fencing with ornamental screens. And bringing up the eggs again.

  Surprised to hear her say that this is a farewell address. She’s standing down as secretary of state for entertainment to take up a new challenge in the private sector as lobbyist to the Arts Marketing Board. Apparently she’ll be representing arts providers and their shareholders, so let’s hope for a prosperous arts community in the future, one that builds on exisiting consultant contacts.

  SATURDAY Five-a-zeitgeist theoretical football. Art As Economic Passenger 0, Art As Economic Driver 1.

  SUNDAY Audit my artistic boundaries in the recliner. Summary: flexible, with scope for significant reshaping.

  June 20, 2013

  The Plagiarism Assizes

  MONDAY Plagiarism is an ugly word. It suggests thievery, obviously. But it just sounds ugly.

  ‘Plagiarism’. Like something nasty you catch from a stranger on the internet. Which is how it usually spreads, of course. Like a virulent, lucrative rumour.

  They say troubles come in threes. No surprise then that my legal interns are currently dealing with a troika of bullshit from some of my bitterest rivals. The claims themselves are laughable. It is almost as if certain people have looked at my work, thought ‘why didn’t I think of that?’ then forwarded that thought to some intellectual property busybollocks who has finessed it into ‘Why! Didn’t I think of that?’

  And the next thing I know, I’m being sued up to the gallbladder by speccy chancers in buttoned, tieless shirts from here to fucking Addis Ababa.

  TUESDAY Turn up to the Plagiarism Assizes, only to find someone’s nicked my slot! Apparently this happens a lot.

  WEDNESDAY Oh great. Court One. Justice Clone-Waugh. He has a fearsome reputation for getting to the bottom of things. We’ll be here all week.

  First up, some ludicrous ponce from an ‘international urban design and space choreography studio’ in California alleges I stole the ‘crowd ambience’ for my private prayer therapy centre in Tamworth from renderings of his stupid animal church in Santa Monica.

  Note the SKY in my Auteur’s Impression, m’lud. Does it look like Santa Monica to you? It’s the colour of cigarette ash. Yes, I concede that the facial expressions of pedestrians in our renderings are identical. But these people are smugly anticipating entirely different outcomes.

  Those heading for the animal church are expecting redemption for their pets. In my scenario, potential customers are converging for communionised self-pity and as a sidebar, there’s nobody on a Segway in a bandanna traversing anything that could possibly be called a ‘micro-plaza’. Plus the people in the Tamworth drawings are fatter.

  Justice Clone-Waugh carefully weighs the body mass indices, inducts the integers sana cum laude and infers via hearing loop that it’s – bang! CASE DISMISSED.

  THURSDAY Next, a mischievous claim that I did, with foreknowledge and malice, base the design of my residential tower in Middlesbrough (hereafter known as the ‘Value Sausage’) on the design of a vertical community encasement in Moscow (literally, the ‘Iberico Luxury Cylinder of Executive Meat and Gristle’).

  Some theatrically affronted dickhead is now demanding that either he gets a small fortune in compensation, or an assurance that the Value Sausage is demolished immediately. Luckily for me, he insists on wearing a little hat in court, ‘in accordance with my atheist beliefs’. This infuriates Justice Clone-Waugh, who pronounces the claim null and void:

  ‘All sausage-emulating architecture is defined only partially by its visual appearance. Of far greater importance is the common presence inside these built forms of humanity itself, the as it were connective tissue that inhabits and defines all nicknamed landmarks. In the context of a global skyline crowded with giant sausages, I find the plaintiff’s assertion of saucisson sui generis de facto profundis to be frankly laughable and very poorly translated’.

  Bang! CASE DISMISSED.

  FRIDAY Last hurdle. Some posturing arsetrumpet in a bespoke frock has accused me of stealing her idea to create a completely new upper tier of London.

  I was entirely ignorant of her proposals for ‘Upper Jersey’ – a very crude notion to confer tax exemption on anyone with a registered London address more than 200m above ground level.

  My own suggestion – Aero Docklandsville – was much more nuanced and set at a slightly lower altitude. I accept that my client, a Qatari gentleman who wishes to remain anonymous, may have been influenced by ‘Upper Jersey’. He definitely saw the initial drawings for this, shortly before commissioning me to map out Aero Docklandsville. What does this prove? Am I responsible for the amoral workings of my client’s mind?

  Bang! CASE UPHELD, FINED SIX MILLION EUROS.

  SATURDAY So much for Qatari-owned British justice. I will be appealing against this harsh judgement, and making things as complicated as possible in order to avoid incurring interest on the six million euros.

  I don’t think the plagiarism industry realises whom they have pissed off here. We’ll see who’s laughing when that certain Qatari gentleman receives a very strongly worded letter from my friend the Prince of Wales!

  SUNDAY Repeat of last Sunday’s occurrence in the recliner.

  June 27, 2013

  Cross-Glaminated Poverty Style-Out

  Four years after the Beige Building Awards replaced the Green Building Awards, the competition is fiercer than ever. It’s always a shame that there has to be a winner. Depressing, in fact.

  Feels like ancient history now, the pre-austerity world, with its ‘green’ this and its ‘sustainable’ that. And how wasteful it seems, with our New Frugalist hindsight. We squandered so much visual capital. Created buildings that were ecologically sound AND attractive. What a scandalous waste of neural and optical resources. Green. How laughably inappropriate for these joyless times we now trudge through.

  Of course it takes a dazzlingly ordinary building to win a beige accolade. The stakes are lower than ever. ‘Austerity Chic’ is now merely the name of a pub trib
ute band.

  As usual the judges were looking for that magic post-green combination of ‘economically prim’ and ‘spectacularly dull’. As I say, it’s a shame there has to be a winner and to be honest this year we just couldn’t be arsed to pick one. Shortlisted Beige Projects of the Year were as follows.

  Mumford-Lowry Centre, Salford Beige An ingenious combination of charity shop economics (pop-up clothes boutique) and vegetative retrofit (hanging baskets). The project’s point of departure was a corner of Salford Beige Retail Centre, where a cluster of vacant units turned recession into opportunity.

  A team of spatialology students from the University of Salford Beige Retail Centre experimented with notions of ‘Lowry’ and ‘retail’, translating sentences into French via a free online service. Soon a nondescript section of mall was renamed Boulevard des Hommes Allumettes and the faux-vintage clothing ironised as ‘cross-glaminated poverty style-out’. Now fully up and running, energy levels remain impressively low.

  A Beige Crossing For The Thames Magic arborealist Isis de Cambray was asked by the mayor of London to imagine ‘something less than a bridge, something less than a garden’. She mapped out a zero-carbon, zero-finance intervention along Blackfriars railway line featuring indigenous weedlife and inter-seasonal energy storage through the sustainable medium of urban litter. A very soft environmental landing indeed for the beige-fingered doyenne.

  Beige Statting Hub, Haggerston Masterbeiged by Haggerston Plastiche Collective, this non-interfunctionalist remodelling of a derelict dry cleaner’s features a secluded wildlife roof and an ‘arm’s-length’ conservation of the building itself.

  Existing form and mass are preserved separately behind blown-up pictures in the windows (stills from Transformers and Carry On films). A carbon-neutral website invites members of the Haggerston community to ‘think of the kind of statistics the building might notionally be a hub for the collation of’. Particular attention was paid to achieving an airtight font pool, with targets of 5m³/hr/m² for imagined space and 7m³/hr/m² at weekends.