Far from being an irrelevant product of a bygone era, the hand-made object is set to return to the fold of consumer goods with force, indeed in many ways it already has, and its significance is only growing. While we live in an age of mass reproduction, we are also in a transitional societal phase, and the uniform, endlessly reproduced status quo brought about by mechanisation is giving way to the personalized, the fragmented and the tribalized. The hand-made object responds to the need of the individual in the current age to express an identity; the individual no longer finding any identification within the large and uniform context of public culture. With electric media we find ourselves more and more connected to each other and to our objects, and find that we are forced to demand an accounting of where every item in our lives has come from and where it is going. The hand-made object is a reaction against the dehumanising effects of mechanisation, a mode of operation that now appears terribly outmoded and doomed to obsolescence.
Thoughts On: Gursky at Southbank Centre
On April 8th I took a visit to the Hayward Gallery at Southbank Centre to check out the Andreas Gursky exhibition that was running from the 25th of January until the 22nd of April. Being generally unfamiliar with Gursky's work but finding some of it of a certain appeal, I entered the exhibition with little in the way of expectations. The exhibition covered some four decades worth of work by Gursky, whose signature style is perhaps his monumental photographs: a distant viewpoint of large structures or crowds of people at massive size, teaming with detail and clarity. Incidentally, that last bit is the first thing I want to talk about.
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