A musing on paper towels, minimalism and green aesthetics
I haven’t used this site in a while but while making myself some guacamole I started to think about my kitchen and this week being Green week.
I’m going to spare you the common Leftist diatribe that you have probably already read elsewhere how Earth Day/Green week is all a bunch of corporate greenwashing by companies like NBC/General Electric. Or what I will call the Skeptic crowd (who revere memos by CATO) and would say its a regulatory hoax and any “solution” is non-sustainable to the point of being heavily dependent on common resource chains. What I am interested in is what I would call a possibly soft or unconscionable shift in green aesthetics.
When I say green aesthetics, the first thing that may come to mind are the obvious signifying qualities of something being green. For example, the hemp sandals that I am presently wearing made by Simple. It’s not that they are just recycled or hemp, its that they must carry the aesthetics of looking as if i’m wearing two burlap sacks on my feet. This is what I would say is the form of hard green aesthetics. One that screams the politics on their sleeves. This is also something pointed out with critiques about the Toyota Prius in that its success is that it looks environmentally friendly as opposed to the Civic hybrids that function similarly but don’t sell anywhere the number of models because they still look like a regular compact car. So much so that now Honda has come out with a new Insight that mirrors the contours of the Prius.
However, what I find more fascinating that these obvious symbols is what I will call soft green aesthetics. For the most part these don’t even reference themselves as even being green. The most obvious example of this, at least in my opinion, has been the shift (coinciding with the rise of the green popularity) to interior design minimalism. New homes or model home dwellings for the 21st century consumer convey a perceived sleek elegance. And I think this is the common perception that this trend in design minimalism is conveyed through a sense of elegance and organization so the homeowner doesn’t need to be the homemaker and spend their weekends having to go through the chaos of their home trying to find and clean everything. It lacks the sentimentalism of the decades before where gaudy photos and garnishing of the nuclear age have been replaced with streamlined furniture and appliances.
It sounds like i’m selling it by its own claim, but i’m not. What I find interesting about these homes is the “lack of stuff.” The knick-knacks, the wastefully spent and kitsch items of no purpose are hidden. These homes are based on what they don’t show. It is about hiding consumerism. Homes of the past were like your grandparents place. Basically full of crap. Figurines, snow globes, cheap novelty items that were displayed around the house as if they had value beyond their material construction. But now people of the green generation feel shamed in consumerism. They have it, but its hidden in the drawers below the empty counter-tops.
The function of the home is also in denial.
I went to help a friend with a plumbing problem last week. He had quite the fancy modern and minimalist interior. I went to the kitchen looking for paper towels but the counter-tops were completely empty. Both the garbage basket and paper towels were hidden behind doors and out of plain view. As if you were to go into the place you would think no consuming goes on there, no waste made, no paper towels to be used. The reality is that behind the kitchen doors were tons of products ready to be wasted.
This didn’t strike me until today when I went into my own kitchen to make myself some guacamole. Right next to me were paper towels within arms reach and a garbage basket below me so I could throw the seed and skins out (I don’t compost skins since they take much longer than other compostable materials to breakdown). I’m not proud of waste but its a fact that happens and I don’t have it shyed away and hidden so I can doubt it ever occurs. The aestetics of my kitchen come far behind function. I’m all for decreasing our use and dependency of such items, particularly paper towels, but my curiosity with the aesthetics of minimalism and whether hiding away consumption is whether it is a productive or problematic recognition of our own waste? On one hand a person is making a deccisive choice to not want to see it, but if its kept hidden from plain view then is the situation just being suppressed?
Review: DJ Spooky’s Terra Nova: Sinfonia Antarctica
Last night I saw DJ Spooky perform his latest work Terra Nova: Sinfonia Antarctica at UCSB’s Campbell Hall. It was so inspiring that I had to get behind the keyboard. I’m also writing this because I would have loved to have spoke at length with Paul (aka DJ Spooky) about his meditation but I didn’t want to be “that person” who ends up monopolizing all the time talking while others are waiting in line.
When I first found out that DJ Spooky (Paul D. Miller) had begun working on an “Antarctic suite” last year, my real question was why? My cynicism made me think it would be a “hip-hopera” set to March of the Penguins where it explored an appropriation of the Antarctic visual landscape that has come to prominence through the recent strain of penguin movies. Instead what I saw was something absolutely genius and something I think is Miller’s best work yet.
It is the first time I have seen a meditation or any media about Antarctica from a position that underscored the universal and plural function of the region. Excluding assigned territories from the original treaty, Antarctica contains the world’s largest common-space of land. It was meant to symbolize the dawning of an international age with the function to promote world peace and cooperation rather than be subject to the conflict of a power grab by colonizers. This was similar to the way Al Gore described the famous Earth Rise photo in An Inconvenient Truth and how that functioned to promote global unity. Miller also made this point apparent in one sequence when flags of the world shuffled over and over across the screen in what conveyed a very cohesive composition between countries being interlocked in a way of forming a global quilt of nations that were conjoined by Antarctica.
I left feeling that the commons were a step forward with promoting international solidarity. However not everyone felt this way. Walking out of the theater, it was surprising to overhear so many jeers by the audience who either didn’t know what to make of it or as one lady described it as “boring and self-indulgent.” It’s unfortunate there wasn’t a discussion afterwards because I believe it would have cleared up a lot of misconceptions and allowed for this meditation to create a public discourse from it. In the lobby I heard another couple comment how repetitive the opening portion was. I felt like inserting myself into their conversation but I was waiting in a line. However on this point about repetition and extended time duration, I think it came at a fitting point during the “arrival” as we experienced what Werner Herzog also noted during the flight into Antarctica in Encounters at the End of the World. In the film, Herzog commented about this sense of time vanishing as if you are crossing into this parallel realm. The sort of experience you would see in science fiction when someone travels through a portal or the “flying house” experience in Wizard of Oz. In this regard I believe Miller has structured this film in an autobiographical experience that mirrors his own entrance into Antarctica, positioning us as the viewer to experience what he must have felt crossing over into Antarctica. After you have been sucked in down the rabbit hole to this other world of Antarctica, Miller draws on the initial experiences one would likely feel. A bedazzlement of the sublime, the feeling of a natural vastness that allows you to begin examining the intricacies of the landscape. You begin to hear the ice, sense the rawness of the barren environment in Antarctica.
From this point Miller then takes us through the troubles of this landscape by presenting data that makes the viewer conscious to the threat that global warming has on this landscape. This portion reminded of Len Lye’s work with certain visual matches and object movements across screen. The data he presents has a graphical function to be didactic as opposed to just merely be read like one would get their information from the New York Times. It’s a feeling like you are climbing up the mountain of a bar chart displaying anthropogenic C02 levels of the last 150 years which has a more nauseating feeling than merely reading about it in print. However this is where one reservation about the piece could be made. Why not present such data or factoids plainly? It’s true, you don’t get a lot of information but as a meditation piece I don’t believe one should be looking at Terra Nova: Sinfonia Antarctica to be providing you with the educational basis about climate change.
After the show I got to speak with Miller briefly. I asked whether this work was a concious extension of his previous work of remix culture that is an direction of the commons that we can understand about Antartica. He smiled and noded, seemingly delighted that I recognized the commons function of the piece. He also mentioned that going into the process it was something that be built upon once he visited Antartica, as opposed to going there specifically looking for things he already wanted to convey. This is another factor that has lead me to believe Terra Nova: Sinfonia Antarctica was a very personal and spiritual piece for Miller, something that is very much memorialized with the experience of going there. I also believe this may attribute to why it is performed differently from time to time, something ad libbed by memory of his experiences as it brought together the way you may reflect on a journey in life differently depending on what mental photographs you recall from it.
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