We still radically separate ornament from style and meaning, treating it as superfluous and superficial, yet it is the primary experience we have of much of our artifactual world – surface treatment.

After the likes of Owen Jones (Grammar of Ornament -[Link]), there are few works like Gombrich’s Sense of Order [Link] that take pattern seriously and liberate it from the fine art :: decorative craft distinction. (Though I also constantly return to Alois Riegl, Henri Focillon and George Kubler.)

The topic fascinated me in my own study of ancient Corinthian ceramics (at the beginnings of the Mediterranean city state), where I refused the distinction and dealt with surface treatment, including both figurative painting as well as geometric and floral pattern, in a contextual study of design [Link]. My broad point now is that ornament/pattern is precisely the worked ground against which subject matter is set, even to the point where ground is more significant and eclipses apparent subject matter (this a variation on my obsession with signal-noise relationships in the history of design).

But how can so much be encompassed in a single synoptic view? Diana and Christina offer a bold thematics, set in a timeline, from antiquity to modernity. Their wonderful topics include: flamboyant gothic, glowing grotesques, the dramatic and the divine, floral perfection, compositions of refinement, patterns of richness, bold colors and abstracts, tartan grids, all accompanied by acute commentary and contextual reference.

This is a reminder of just how much analytic attention we still need to apply to the world of design and making, and how hampered we are by the narrowness of art and design history, even when they mobilize the likes of semiotics (as Tilley and I attempted as part of our contribution to the emerging field of material culture studies in the 80s [Link]).

Two new books add depth to my long-running ruminations on the character of things.

Nonobject, by Branko Lukic and Barry Katz, was published this week by MIT Press [Link]

It’s a rather beautiful book about Branko’s design work. Barry (and Bill Moggridge in his foreword) provide fascinating commentary.

The nonobject is inbetween, relational, interstitial, combinatory. What if the designer started not from technical and economic viability in the world of industrial manufacture, nor from people’s needs and desires (in what is commonly called human-centered design), but from the space between? This design work on the nonobject would be about how people get on with things.

Branko’s nonobjects are presented in the book as artifacts, though most are imaginary or “conceptual” (for example, made from “thinium” – the perfect material). Many are ironic – a light switch becomes a philosophical gesture (let there be light!); a toilet is made of cut-crystal; here is a collection of clocks that don’t tell the time (at least don’t perform as chronometers); an umbrella that doesn’t deflect but captures rain.

Oxymoronic one-legged chairs attest to controlled imperfection. Exaggeration – cutlery with infinitely thin handles. Metaphor (an assertion of identity in difference): books that are fluid – quenching our mind’s thirst. Some are quite cynical, defiant: there’s a collection of artifacts designed entirely according to an aesthetic of 90 degree form – a rectilinear bicycle (though without square wheels!).

Shades everywhere of surrealism – “ceci n’est pas un pipe”.

Irony, metaphor, exaggeration, oxymoron: these all are, of course, tropes. Design here is truly a field of rhetoric: an argument for … Well what? I’m not sure really.

Many pose questions of the form “what if …?” If biodiversity were applied to consumer electronics … . They are counterfactuals. (I posted some comments on fakes, authenticity and counterfactuals in this blog – [Link] [Link]). I do like this. There is indeed alterity implicit in any form (we can even invoke Adorno’s negation of the negation!) Barry’s commentary revels in these kind of references.

I have some concerns, because the irony wears thin. The book is really quite elitist and sometimes almost arrogant in the eclipse of any kind of politics of industrial design (just who is all this for?). All the (non)objects are photographed according to that clean minimalist aesthetic that focuses attention precisely upon the object made aesthetic. There’s a meta-irony here – here is a book about nonobjects that presents us with a beautifully fetishized collection of utterly alienated beautiful objects, museum pieces in the cool clean light of the vitrine, looking like the great icons of modern design.

But I am left with a fascination for the argument of this rhetoric of things – that we should think not of objects, but of fields, of connection, of mediation, of in-between, of tangible intangibles, where figure and ground collude in the forensic doubting that asks – just what are we dealing with here? [Link] [Link]; see also my recent remarks on Kenya Hara’s Ku (Emptiness) [Link]. And yes – the very notion of human-centered design raises the key question of just what we understand by humanity. Human and object are not so distinct as commonly held.

This comes across also in the book of the exhibition – Unearthed – edited by Doug Bailey, Andrew Cochrane, and Jean Zambelli for the Sainsbury Center for Visual Arts [Link]

Prehistoric figurines – just what are they?

Again – we are presented not with objects, but with possibilities, questions, arguments, connections, processes. Interminglings through material, making, metaphor. Toys, dolls, miniatures, models, fetishes … . The book ranges far and wide in its associations.

Both these books about objects are collections. They are wonderful experiments in pragmatology – explorations of objects as “things” – collectives, gatherings, assemblages.

In the North East of England for the Binchester excavations – Vinovium.org.

Dere Street, the Roman road that passes through Binchester, here runs north across what is now the English-Scottish border.

There was a medieval village – Kemblepath – up here in the wilds of Upper Coquetdale. On the site of Chew Green, the Roman fort and earthworks.

Map – UK Government M(ulti) A(gency) G(eographic) I(nformation) for the C(ountryside)

(Aerial photo – Tim Gates)

Dere Street crosses the River Coquet.

Staying with Christina (Unwin) and Richard (Hingley).

Abbey, Welsh, Black Labrador Retriever, nearly 15, at home in northern California

I have been working on a portfolio of photos I had put to one side. They are of the old covered markets in Thessaloniki. I was visiting Kostas Kotsakis in April 2006.

More at archaeographer.com

Daguerreotype c 1850. Oblique view.

See the project Ghosts in the machine.

As ever, the locality is, for me, one of few fragile traces of somewhat indeterminate and agricultural pasts, juxtaposed with major investment in business futures. An old (cultivated) apple tree in the nearby field, railway carriages in the town converted to offices, a stretch of old timber fencing, the odd scattering of flint blades: new and increasingly vast plantings of Pinot Noir, flashy tasting rooms designed to look like traditional well-to-do farm residences and buildings, a new art gallery under construction in town.

This week my fascination with old media took me back to the collection of worn and abraded Daguerreotypes I put together from an intense exploration of eBay back in summer 2004.

I had discovered how digital scanning could recover images from these haunting and uncanny polished mirrors (the Daguerreotype, popular in the US between 1840 and 1860, was a one-off positive-negative photographic image held in a silver plating of copper).

Daguerreotype c1850

I have now started a somewhat obsessive project of rephotography – reworking these most finely resolved of portrait images.

A mirror conveys depth – another world beyond or behind the surface.

Could it be the same with the polished mirror surface of the Daguerreotype?

Here is a detail, one of many I made this week (scale is about x10 – x15 at screen resolution) -

More about this project in archaeography – Link

Meanwhile Sam, as part of his management of Google applications, was again thinking of the future of photography.

OK – what happens when you make vast spaces available for people to upload and share their photos, as in flickr or picasa from Google? Tagging more and more pictures with their location is going to be quite fascinating. The implications of quantity – colossal scale and magnitude of imagery.

I am convinced that the materiality of the image is going to grow in importance – people’s sensitivity to their material mode of engagement with an image – the screen, the paper, the printed page, the surface

More information – Link

Gallery – Link

Gallery 2004 – Link

Chesters Roman Fort, Cilurnum.

Northumberland UK

Deniseburna near Hefenfelth on Hadrian’s Wall. 633 or 634. Oswald of Bernicia met and defeated in battle Cadwallon ap Cadfan of Gwynedd.

(Polaroid transfer)

Dawn.

For Christina Unwin and Richard Hingley.

Molly and Emma.

Site of several scenes in “The Sandpiper” – Vincente Minnelli 1965 – [Link]

Ben and Josephine

One of those staged viewpoints.

We are little different from the days of the Claude Glass – a tinted convex mirror through which the tourist or artist of the picturesque and sublime could see a composed and painterly image.

Now we have the wide angle lens, saturated color (after Fuji Velvia), and the LCD of the digital camera.

Boonville, Dan’s radio station.

Fuji Fortia (super saturated color transparency for the tastes of the Japanese market), old stock.

Casado pinhole camera.

Bamburgh, Northumberland

Five minutes off the tourist trail.

In the tracks of northern antiquaries, summer 2007

Part of the estate of the second Earl Grey (1832 Reform Bill) on the Northumberland coast, UK.

Tracking Sarah Jacob – Three Rooms

Photographs taken after the death of a child were popular in the mid nineteenth century.

Daguerreotype, 1850s, eastern USA.