17/10/13
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Today I bought “Words and Buildings” by Adrian Forty firstly because its frontispiece contains a quote from Humpty Dumpty in Through the Looking Glass “When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less”, secondly because it quotes Roland Barthes as follows ” Why does fashion utter clothing so abundantly? Why does it interpose between the object and its uses, such a luxury of words (not to mention images), such a network of meaning?” from The Fashion System, 1967- this second quote interested me because it seems to have something to do with the research I am doing on government creative industries policy, and thirdly because it turns out that unbenknownst to me in my day 2 post I was quoting Mies van der Rohe “Don’t talk.”. Perhaps without knowing it a hook to hang this blog on is emerging- recalcitrance, a celebration of the recondite? In any event I will be reading more but possibly not the whole book, a task I find troublesome, more troublesome than I would like. Fortunately in interviewing sculptor Martin Boyce recently he provided the perfect rationale for my short attention span curiosity- the idea of wild knowledge- which he appropriated from elsewhere and proposes to mean that knowledge that is acquired piecemeal and haphazardly, positioning this as a positive.
I brought the book in Edinburgh’s Fruitmarket Galllery where I had ended up because I missed a train, while I was there I bumped in to Francis Bickmore of Canongate Books who promised to send me a copy of David Byrne’s How Music Works as he felt if I was reading about Words and Buildings and thinking about creativity then I should also be including something from Canongate in my wild knowledge. Its a good title so we will see.
This is the last reference I am going to make to my work for the government: in the UK we are constantly entangled with the notion of creative industries in a largely unhelpful way. Sadly the idea of creative industries is a British invention, something now widely exported. When it was first defined by Tony Blair’s new labour party in the white heat of political reform no one thought to ask what a non-creative industry might look like, even an arms manufacturer uses creativity in its pursuit of destruction.
For those with long enough memories White Heat apart from being a great movie starring James Cagney and one half of the title of the outstanding Velvet’s track is also a quote from a previous post war social democrat prime minister in the UK, Harold Wilson, who believed that the white heat of technology would drive the UK forward- as it turns out many decades later it would, but rather than world leading engineering it transpired in the form of gun toting criminal avatars in Grand Theft Auto. Best just to put the Velvet’s track on loud and move on …
…. and then later today on some faraway beach
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