The Battle for the Infrastructure of Everyday Life
Written for the inaugural NGV Triennal publication
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Ewan McEoin kindly asked me to contribute a piece to the publication accompanying the National Gallery of Victoria’s inaugural Triennal, a show that The Guardian just called “one of the most exciting exhibitions ever mounted in Australia … an unflinching exploration of the modern world.” Huge congratulations to Ewan McEoin, Simon Maidment, Megan Patty, Pip Wallis, Myf Doughty, and the NGV team for the show, and the publication.—London, December 2017
The Battle for the Infrastructure of Everyday Life
The object of design in the twenty-first century is the city itself. In the nineteenth century, it was the nation state, the factory and its engines, and the channels of globalised capitalism that began to emerge around that — clippers, canals, cables and contracts. In the twentieth century, the state and global markets became more complete versions of themselves, meaning politics and possessions were the order of the day. Art and design responded accordingly, often the willing handmaidens of these shifts.
Now, however, those late twentieth-century values, drifting towards individualism, have simply been stretched taut into the twenty-first, and the whole thing is ‘buffering’ as a result. Or at least has hit a punctuation point: a question mark or ellipsis in the form of events like Brexit, or a series of exclamation marks in the case of Trump (or perhaps the blast of random punctuation marks that used to denote swearwords in Asterix).
The philosopher Jacques Attali, in A Brief History of the Future (2006), foresaw an end-point to this relentless drift towards the individual being the centre of things, noting the reductive movement, an endless shortening of the focal length, from religion to region to nation to person. He wrote of an erasure of nation states into a fully globalised market (‘hypercapitalism’), with two core industries: ‘insurance’ and ‘distraction’. It’s best to gloss over what follows — a planetary ‘hyperconflict’ — even if Attali ends on a broadly optimistic note of a world government as the only possible way of humanity finally addressing climate change (‘hyperdemocracy’).
