Graphics and political triangulation

I have come relatively late to the Browne report in the original, having followed the discussion of its validity and effects for some time. I don’t want here to pass comment on exactly how muddled or tendentious its deliberations are; suffice to say its conclusions are fairly dubious. I am more interested in the form that the report itself takes- graphically polished, sharp, bold and slightly unusual, especially for a government document- the only other examples of which I have seen look as if they were designed by the Microsoft paperclip.

The most startling thing about the opening section of the report is its colour. It is not quite brown- pun resisted on their part, evidently; it is closer to dark beige or khaki. There is something faintly melancholy about hint of green amid the murk, but the overriding connotation is nostalgic, and martial. This is a Ministry of Works kind of colour- the kind that they painted the Morris furniture when they commandeered the Red House. It is a military colour- robust and unaesthetic, but uniform and even, as if very well ironed.

In a time where political discourse is weighted down by sheer volume of faux-martial platitude- courage, toughness, staying the course- the resonance of these allusions is clear, and obviously deliberate. The myth of practical necessity abides in this rhetorical triad- circumstances (appalling), decisions (tough) and judgement (strategic, long-term)- all speaking to an idea of the soldier-politician, the unsentimental guy with a job to do.

So, on page after khaki page the report makes its case- in sections headed, and sometimes subdivided by massive capitals in red or black. The header font, as far as I can tell, is Futura, designed in the late twenties and identified most strongly with the Bauhaus. According to its wikipedia entry,

“Futura has an appearance of efficiency and forwardness. The typeface is derived from simple geometric forms (near-perfect circles, triangles and squares) and is based on strokes of near-even weight... most visible in the almost perfectly round stroke of the o.”

It also has a sense of equanimity about it, and one of evenness, while at the same time being very definite, especially in the sharp points of the A and N. Curiously, it doesn’t look like the normal Futura Black, in which the sharp points are snipped off, but more like a word-processor ‘bold’ version of the light original, which causes the downward point of the N to dip below the line. The Bauhaus has long been prominent in the production of an acceptably unthreatening, aestheticised image of modernism- it is the IKEA font, after all- but the radical echo is still clear. It is more so later on in the document, where massive superscript numbers, thick lines and half-tone photographs stage a faint but still recognisable parody of Rodchenko.

The third point in this politically triangulated graphic effort is the body text, in Mrs Eaves. With its exaggerated twiddles and diffident little vowels, it presents a reasonable, slightly domestic and definitely sympathetic face- a foil to the blaring, self-proclaimed authority of the titles. Mrs Eaves is a friendly little font, and quite traditional with it- not for nothing the calculated propriety and cosiness of ‘Mrs’; but in a way it is the most ruthless gesture of the lot- this is the bit where the lies are told. When the invidiously framed comparison between the fee and graduate tax is made (page ten), the fact that it is shown in Mrs Eaves makes it appear un-ideological, down-to-earth. ‘Our plan’, ‘our proposals’- with their sweet, modest little curves, and tall, slightly awkward ascenders, who could really take issue with statements like these?

Resistance, as they say, is futile.

The ghost of the grid

One of the best passages in Tony Judt’s short final book is a mournful section on the lost rites of welfarist citizenship and their sites: the post-office, bus stop, public library.

“Think for a minute about the importance of something as commonplace as an insurance card or pension book. Back in the early days of the welfare states, these had to be regularly stamped or renewed in order for their possessor to collect her pension, food stamps or child allowance. These rituals of exchange between the benevolent state and its citizens... [and] the shared experience of relating to public authority and public policy- incarnated in these services and benefits- contributed ... to a tauter sense of shared citizenship.”

[from Alistair Black et al. Books, Buildings and Social Engineering Ashgate 2009]

These places and rituals- now being driven to extinciton by a mixture of political conviction and supposed technological ‘necessity’- were in their early years understood by the conceptual model of ‘the Grid’- an allusion to the then recently completed electrical grid. A diagram of the library network in Herefordshire from 1938 demonstrates the seductiveness of the analogy: branches appear as crisp circles or squares, linked by a web of lines of force, as if the whole county were gently humming.

As a map or explanatory tool it lacks a certain something- even for people who knew the county it would have been difficult in many places to work out what was going on. But as a propagandic demonstration of the modern, complex organisation of local amenity it must have been impressive. Nowadays, its attraction is basically nostalgic- it appeals for the same reason that pre-Beeching maps of British railways do (although less, obviously). As much as anything this is because the model of broad, egalitarian and universalist service that it suggests is also one that tolerates extreme smallness of scale and diversity of place. A railway that could tolerate a service for Tumby Woodside or Windmill End looks now, like a bulwark of resistance to the subsequent flattening-out of place and particularity, clone towns and so forth, although whether it felt like that at the time is probably another matter.

One of the most prominent formulations of the political right over the last couple of decades has been to conflate of ‘bureaucracy’ and state management with standardisation, centralisation and distance. But it’s clear that the purpose of the Grid idea was quite different- indeed, its beauty was to suggest that free, universal, egalitarian and accessible services could animate rather than occlude the intimate scale and diversity of the places that it reached.

I’m not proposing to adjudicate on the validity or truth of this hypothesis, although I know what I think. But it is an important idea, and one that I’ll be returning to this theme in later posts, because it illuminates some other things I have been looking at recently.

St Jerome in his study [part i]

The view of Jerome is framed by a stone arch. He is inside this sunlit portal, and we are outside it, looking in. It gives the picture a self-conscious and rather deliberate feeling, but also a playful one. In deliberately displaying the act of 'framing', the painting is referencing the act of compositional contrivance that all paintings partake in, as if unmasking at the very outset the artifice of its own creation.

The doorway is neither straightforwardly a framing device, nor a naturalistically depicted element in a realistic scene. The tonal contrast between the radiant umber stone and the shadowy interior of the 'study' is quite extreme at the top of the picture, but less so at the bottom, where soft shadows slant away from the door's corners and crawl up the side of Jerome's desk. By contrast with the depth and complexity of the interior, the articulation of the door is comically restrained- the capitals on either side of the arch are reduced to plain outlines, with the whole assemblage topped by a ludicrous miniature bauble. The distinction between the 'interior' and 'exterior' is profound and very noticeable but not total; the door appears to occupy an odd ambivalent point, neither fully part of, nor genuinely separate from, the rest of the painting. Its reflexive self-consciousness passes to us; we are aware of ourselves looking, of stepping inside the frame, because it literally shows the 'threshold' between our space and that shown inside the painting.

Sitting on the step of this threshold are an object and two creatures- a quail, a peacock, and a golden bowl. The hard-headed author of this site instructs us that "the peacock and partridge have no importance to the story of St. Jerome"- although, like many objects in Renaissance paintings they possess symbolic values. It is difficult to determine exactly what these are, however, and I don't want to try, because what is interesting is not so much what they mean as how they appear. The birds both strike the same pose: full profile, looking dignified, puffed-up and somewhat heraldic. In this, they almost could be mimicking Jerome- perhaps more so the pensive quail than the graceful peacock. But there is also something lifeless about their perfect stillness, which is is magnified by their positioning. The bowl and birds are all in a row, rather neatly lined up but positioned slightly incidentally, neither equally spaced nor symmetrical around the centre of the arch. Each looks 'placed', and clearly none is in motion. This isn't natural or random, but neither is it purely symbolic and rational. It is most reminiscent of the deliberate, well-groomed randomness of still-lives or the backgrounds of portrait interiors. In short, it is tempting to read a kind of equivalence across the three, to see all three as 'objects' after a fashion.

The question which this raises is, should this equivalence be read more generally across the painting? Is Jerome, sitting inert in his chair, also an object?

St Jerome in his study [intro]

St Jerome was a popular subject for painters at a certain moment in the 15th century. In the old master rooms at the National Gallery you see him again and again; a white-haired scholar, reading in a desert cave, usually with an incongruous and strangely unthreatening lion somewhere in the middle distance. There are variations: sometimes the lion sits attentively while Jerome declaims from his translation of the bible, at other times the lion has come to find Jerome in what appears to be the scriptorium of a monastery. The life of St Jerome was heavy both on corporeal works and miracles; he wrote and translated prolifically, but also found time to tame a wild lion, from whose paw he removed a thorn, and which afterwards followed him like a dog.

He is the subject of one of the strangest and most interesting pictures I've ever seen; St Jerome in his study, by Antonello da Messina. When you see the picture, that cliché often repeated of Tristam Shandy- of being postmodern before there was any modern to be post- immediately suggests itself. Its composition, all blind corners and diminishing frames within frames, could be taken from a Peter Greenaway film, as could the odd miscellany of suggestive objects that litter the painting. It immediately seems that an intricate and sophisticated symbolic game is being played, but it isn't clear what its rules are. The surfaces of Jerome's study teem with exotic birds, vases, book, and miniature plants; but the study itself, absurdly, appears to have been erected in the middle of a vast, empty church.

I can't pretend to have any professional insight into Renaissance symbolism, or theology, but I still want to attempt a close reading of the painting. As much as any other feature, what intrigues me is the multilayered space of the picture, with its oddly static characters and profusion of detail. Even sticking only to what is actually visible- resisting the urge to decode anything- there is a huge amount of ground to cover. As a survey, I suppose this is at least tangentially architectural- concerning itself with formal choices and their effects- and thus hopefully understandable on that basis.

City metaphors

These spreads, from O.M. Ungers' Morphologie: City Metaphors (1976), were an attempt to spark a richer and more productive discussion over urban form. All design begins with images:

"In every human being there is a strong metaphysical desire to create a reality structured through images in which objects become meaningful through vision and which does not (...) exist because it is measured."

His argument, stated obliquely in the introduction, was that an approach based too much measurable criteria- square metres, pounds and pence- had been left denuded of conceptual sophistication, instinct, and depth.

Symbolic, analogical or metaphorical thinking was not meant to act as a substitute for statistical analysis, but did hope to break its "claim [to] a monopoly of understanding".

Like many fascinating books of the seventies, Ungers' Morphologie was fighting a battle that is definitely now finished. The functionalist technocracy that he was tilting at- all point blocks and space standards- would be totally gone in most of Europe and America within a decade, and the burgeoning of symbolic thinking in architectural and urban design would produce only the rottenly ubiquitous, self-consciously self-serving 'icon'.

That isn't Ungers' fault, and, unlike some of his contemporaries, he isn't blasé about the potential for a great big metaphor to be fatuous, or stupid, without proper analysis and criticism. The creative and pragmatic would alternate, not as "opposed [methods], but more in the direction that analysis and synthesis alternate as naturally as breathing in and breathing out, as Goethe put it..."