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Hey y’all! Yesterday at 4:00pm (uk time)  a slew of original, destined to be priceless pieces of nouveau street art went on sale, courtesy of Brooklyn based outfit ‘Faile’.

Over the past year Faile’s profile in the UK has risen steadily, thanks in part to their work being featured in Banksy’s “Cans Festival” and Tate Modern’s current celebration of the movement, 'street blah' or something.

Faile’s style is a mixture of stencil and comic book graphics with a visible reference to erotica and anime. However,  rather than go for the shock factor favored by other street artists their work is often made to blend in with it's urban surroundings,   the pieces often  resembleing fly-poster’s or hookers calling cards. This is said to be a comment on societys' obsession with graffiti as vandalism, whilst illegal advertising still maintains a relatively low profile...

Anyway. If your feeling rich mosey on down to www.faile.net and get your hands something nice for your bachelor/bachelorette pad.  Due to the high demand they are operating a lottery system for originals, but prints are ready to go.

P.S.  Keep your eye’s peeled on their site for updates on their coming London Show!

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We are living in an age that is becoming increasingly materialistic. People seem to constantly be looking to own the ‘next big thing’, something more expensive, more impressive than the next guy. How this has happened is beyond me. Why are products being produced that compromise function for aesthetics? Who decided that it would be an awesome idea to make a product that doesn’t operate properly, but looks amazing in the front room?

I regularly visit museums and galleries. Time and time again I have been disappointed. As society becomes progressively numb to global and domestic problems such as disease, disability, an ageing population (in the developed world) and unemployment, to name a few, we still seem to see designers concentrating on aesthetics and barely considering the real purpose of their product.

One example was the Zaha Hadid exhibition at the Design Museum last December. I am exemplifying this particular show because she is ‘all the rage’ at the moment. The Guardian calls her a ‘starchitect’ and ‘the worlds best female architect’. If you have seen her work, you will know that is visually stimulating.  

At first glance I was genuinely impressed, as one might be by the crown jewels. After a good minute of being captivated by the aesthetics, however, my brain interrupted by snapping my eyes out of their trance and I began to realise that every single design, product and building, had been generated as a direct result of her over-expanded ego. From chairs and sofas that no one can comfortably sit on, to buildings that ignore their environment in which they are built. Has she designed ANYTHING with the consumer in mind? She couldn’t, if her life depended on it.

Zaha Hadid: "Lamp"

I am not criticising her individuality or her artistic license, but rather her total disregard of the world around her. She designs for herself and no one else. Each building is one huge shrine to herself. She wants to be immortalised and wants us to acknowledge her existence. How pathetic. How selfish.

Design is slowly but surely becoming more the designer rather than the client or consumer.
The show at the RCA was just another example of this shift, and nobody seems to care. Instead of pointing out this embarrassing development in society, we praise it! SOMETHING IS WRONG!

What ever happened to a social conscience? Where are the condoms and light bulbs of 2008? Condoms have saved lives globally! Light bulbs have allowed the world to operate at night! Has everything useful already been designed? Are there no more problems to solve? Is that why people are designing clothes for pets and voice evaluating ice-cream machines? Must be. That whole ‘third world’ thing must have been a dream.

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Perhaps you haven't noticed, in your considerations, the astonishing semblance between the metal safety rails near our windows or roads, and the text-decorations prettifying our books and documents across the years.

-Railing spotted in Carcassonne, France. 

-PD Vector Graphic of an 1870's Printers Ornament 

What fascinates me is the intricate surface detailing of objects apparently designed for the simple purposes of delineation, separation; whether that be between pedestrian and pimpmobile or between chapter and heading. Either way, in noticing it, we accept that content is altered by its surroundings... 

We are subject to the same merry-go-round of freedom in these our decorated words, our so-called free press, as we are on pavements: warned away, even physically restrained from our inalienable rights to jaywalk, play chicken, or attempt vehicular-abuse.

And how is this foul satanism enacted? Through the single fatuous assertion that there exists an aesthetics of function, somehow buried beneath eiderdowns of fluff- the besneered realms of "decoration for the sake of decoration"... And that in flaying these fleeting skins of Style, of Fashion, we are left with a primal aesthetic of distilled purpose! Pure energy!

Bullshit. Still nobody knows the full story- Freedom? $140 per Barrel! Why not- 'We' Might not 'have' Much 'left'.

So what have we got instead? I suppose we can rejoice in the incredible cheapness of our new railings- anybody who loves the look and texture of money but also feels the need to secure themselves against the dangers of roads or defenestration might now have an appreciably better life... Though I do love the taste of money, I am no great fan of its visual aspect, and so I must find other beneficial results of the great disornamental project.

-Modern Railing (impact) from my private collection. 

And so I did, one day, in conversation, and then alone, fall under the spell of the Brutalist. I am deeply troubled (haunted) by terms like Objectivist and Functionalist, but "Brutalist" somehow seems appropriate. I ignore the dictionary definition and use my own: To take the vernacular of cheaply impressive architecture and design- those 20th Century reactions to the coy and sentimental- art that didn't know its name- and revel in exactly the aspects it disavowed: Oh my! What exquisitely quaint urbanity we might find in those so-optimistic tower-blocks, as they are gentrified, covered in "prestige-cladding", or given peculiar sink-arrangements. Nothing quite like stabbing the Knife, eh?

And so in a way I venerate our modern railings, for they are merely the canvas of our humbly tethered imaginations, even as I loathe our promiscuous use of the fleuron in modern design for its affectations of an exoticism coloured primarily in the same pigments as its origination, and subsequent fall from favour: that is- a world where we might scream at decoration for obscuring meaning, only to find, upon removal, that it is the obscure that we love; and, denied it on the page or on the street, we reproduce it in our minds, where it is far more dangerous.

Afterthought: I felt it appropriate to show you some clipart: for me clipart is the only honest page ornamentation for our times, though that's another story.  

-"Graduation" Clipart. I look forward to such unsavoury activities when I finally pay my library fine.

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This week, über cool London venue-come-art space Shunt plays host to “Brussels meets Brighton”.  It’s a visual arts showcase, linking up 100 Artists and 10 bands from the two cities, who between Thursday 31st April and Saturday 3rd will take-over the labyrinth like venue to amaze, scare, entertain and confuse. Live music, puppetry, dance and physical theatre, video and sound installations, photography, slam poetry, science and robotics all feature. Katie Sigafoos, an artist performing with the group Petruscoseye, says she’ll be performing as a “CCTV vigilance com-mittee officer”, a “fishtank” and a “crawling baby war”.

Shunt promises the event to be “an investigation into meta-communication through a massive selection of real-time improvised interdisciplinary and trans-cultural artis-tic collaboration”.  This will take form through something called THE METAHUB. Which is a computerised “Audio-Visual Pool” operated by 12 VJs, DJs and Hackers through which all audio and visual feeds from the entire Lounge will pass. All the participant artists may then take any data-stream to use as they please. The audio contents will be broadcast in real-time on Radio Reverb (Brighton), Radio Panik (Brussels), and Resonance Radio (London). I don’t really know what to expect. I don’t know if they know either…

For more info visit:
www.shunt.co.uk
www.brusselsmeetsbrighton.org
www.petruscoseye.com

For live performances from musicians in Brighton and Brussels who performed to-gether via the web last month, also check out Artefakt .