Michael Bracewell - The Nineties - When Surface was Depth

‘Try writing what you have written in the past tense in the present tense and you will see what I mean. What we have to do is to give back to the past we are writing about its own present tense. We give back to the past its own possibilities, its own ambiguities, its own incapacity to see the consequences of its action. It is only then that we represent what actually happened.’

Professor Greg Dening

http://www.nla.gov.au/events/history/papers/Greg_Dening.html

Cover

Title Page THE NINETIES when surface was depth Michael Bracewell

ONE: Culture-vulturing City Slickers

TWO: The Barbarism of the Self-reflecting Sign

THREE: Exquisite: The Gentrification of the Avant-garde

FOUR: Retro: Running Out of Past

FIVE: Post-industrial/Auric Food

Index

Acknowledgments

Also by the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

It was back in the winter of 1988 – a dark, wet, spiteful afternoon, with the thin rain blown in sudden gusts. Looking down from the penthouse of some mansion flats in Warrington Crescent – it was a real penthouse: there was a roof terrace, and a spiral staircase and everything – you could just make out, in the failing light, the dripping shrubs and sandy little paths of the big private garden that ran behind the length of the entire block.

This elegant oblong of trees and lawn – a Central Park in miniature, transplanted to west London – looked desolate now, with drifts of sodden leaves rising up like sullen brown waves towards the damp-blackened timbers of a trellis. In summer, the same lawn had been scorched white, and peopled throughout the long afternoons by squads of charging, tumbling toddlers, running riot in the dusty sunshine. But now it was early December, and, against the gathering dusk, the tree-tops looked like crooked black fingers, clawing at the lowering sky.

The window panes held darkness. Probably, somewhere down there, forgotten and forlorn, there would be a child’s abandoned tricycle, or a brightly coloured ball, begrimed by weeks in a flower-bed. Something or other, at any rate, to send you one of those sudden jabs of melancholy that quickly casts a shadow across your hopes; some trite but troubling symbol of lost innocence, reminding you, in abstract, of youth and opportunities thrown away (a whole summertime, it seems, of opportunities squandered) – wasted in a mess of jobs and plans and relationships, which had seemed, at the time, to put the kick in life’s chutney.

Beyond the twilit barrier reef of the facing houses, you were aware of the rush-hour traffic, inching ill-tempered towards Marylebone and Marble Arch – the dreary scraping of the windscreen wipers, the black cabs shuddering in an endless jam. Here we were at the tail end of the 1980s, children of the late Fifties and early Sixties, beginning to feel the odd twinge of the thickening process of early middle age, but still young enough to want to carry the fight to the enemy; to emulate the Balzacian hero, staring down on the city of Paris, to declaim, ‘And now you and I come to grips!’

But what, exactly, right now, was there down in the city to come to grips with? The heroism of the war-cry had been replaced by a kind of Mock Heroism, which had declared itself (out of nowhere, too – a sudden hesitancy in the voice, skidding a few tones from manly authority to punctured confidence) only at the moment of announcing the challenge.

Or were the vocal cords simply learning the cadences of irony? Everything had gone all slippery, like spilt mercury; and when the tweezers of criticism tried to pick up a trend or a product or an event it seemed to split up into cunning little sub-sections of itself, scattering hither and thither with a wanton disregard for any singularity of purpose – any one meaning. And this was because everything, it seemed – all the bits and pieces of contemporary culture, from architecture to mineral water – had become semiotic Phenomena; the seismic impact of which, rippling across the surface of the culture, could be placed under the niftily scientific label of Epiphenomena. In the lab of semiotics (you could imagine that it looked like the Clinique counter in a big department store) everything was significant, busily signifying something – it was all signage.

By the end of the 1980s, small things seemed to articulate big things (fascism, fast food and Madonna, for instance, could be studied and assessed within the same academic language – at times within the same sentence); while big things (the burgeoning processes of globalization, for example) were almost too big to see, like those patterns in the desert you can make out only at 37,000 feet.

The penthouse had a main living room that was maybe the size of one and a half tennis courts. The walls were painted a matt shade of pale dove grey, as was the surround of the fireplace, which didn’t imitate Georgian classicism (the style of choice for the Eighties make-over of Edwardiana) so much as pun on it, and then cross out the pun – like making a painting that looked like a painting and then painting over the painting, frame and all, with one colour that was the same shade as the wall.

The lighting, too, was subdued. It came from a neat constellation of dimmer bulbs set into the ceiling, and conveyed – what? A submarine light that made distances difficult to gauge; it made the vast room appear cosy and cold, simultaneously. If you were feeling the jab of melancholy it could seem like the twilight of indecision.

And then, there they were, the two of them: a pair – a brace – of Culture-vulturing City Slickers.

With his back to the big sash window, seated in a grey vinyl cube of a chair, sipping his tea without looking up from the cup, and frowning – a trick he had learned during his brief stint as a chartered surveyor, working in Carlos Place opposite the Connaught Hotel – a critic and curator of high seriousness, Andrew Renton (one of the first – if not the first – art-spotters to identify the gathering nestlings of Young British Art), had just made the statement that ‘culture is wound on an ever-tightening coil’.

He was speaking with reference to the peroxide crew-cutted female vocalist Yazz, who – solely on the strength of her summer Number One, ‘The Only Way is Up’ – had just earned herself an hour-long documentary entitled ‘The Year of Yazz’. And his point was that culture – mass-market popular culture, in particular, as the latest delectable truffle of the age – was being assessed and assimilated into the various strands of media with increasing speed. The brainy end of the fashionable media, especially, were being swift to set their hounds on the trail of the Gilded Truffle: that signifier, punctum, bull’s-eye that changed weekly – sometimes even hourly – but that seemed to sum up the age in one bite …

‘Would You Like to Swing on a Star?’ or A Short History of Cultural Commodification in the 1990s

Picture, if you will, the slack-jawed derision with which Little Richard or Elvis Presley might have greeted an announcement, in 1959, that comedy or cooking was ‘the new rock and roll’. ‘No suh! Ah don’ like it!’ With pianos to straddle and trousers to split, neither of these great architects of the Pop Age would have deigned so much as to give the idea a second thought. That any rival phenomenon could pinch the mantle of rock and roll, or parade around in its borrowed crown, would simply have been unthinkable. Rock and roll defined the modern age, and nothing else would do.