Walk III

Last week I decided to test new grounds and follow a different route. So instead of crossing the Thames towards West End I continued along the south bank towards London Bridge. The chosen path was neither new nor original – just following one of London’s favourite walks from London Eye to Tate Modern and beyond.

But…. Blackfriars Bridge (which you can see on the pic above -  a protagonist of one of the coolest bloody stories from London) is currently being redeveloped and there is a ‘loooong’ detour to get to Tate. On the detour I bumped into some cool places. The first one is an interesting art work under railway tracks.

A cheap description of the photo would be to say this is the essence of London. Colours, diversity and incessant rush. However, what got me interested more is the fact that works of art build indiscriminately from hundreds of colours – i.e. without emphasise on any one of them – tend to give an overall ‘reddish’ impression. It hardly is a unique observation; Renaissance painters knew it, traffic lights designers know it, lipstick producers will continue to abuse it – for some evolutionary reason red just draws human attention more than any other colour. Still, I found the reddish/pinkish ambience of the work interesting.
Another thing that amazed me was this ad for a pizzeria:

Honestly, in how many cities could you find a pizza ad making a clever reference to modern artists? The finding was extremely fortunate given the main topic of my thoughts during these last few walks. I was thinking of identity – namely, what makes us know that A is A and B is not C but B. I find the topic interesting ever since encountering a painting by a Belgian surrealist – Rene Magritte. Hence in a surrealist vein I decided to mock around with reality and produce this result:

Coming back to Magritte’s issue of identity – this is his classic work:

The title is ‘The Treachery of Images’ and says ‘This is not a pipe’. In its time it caused quite a scandal as critics would ask wtf does it mean ‘This is not a pipe?!’. Magritte would answer that it’s not a pipe because you can’t smoke it – it is merely a representation of a pipe on canvas. In other words an object loses its identity the moment it loses its function. Functionality, rather than shape, colour, name, origin, history etc determines the essence of a given object. This way of looking at things is quite useful but poses an interesting (and morbid) problem when you start thinking of people.

Life, and a tip from a friend, offered an example of how the functional way of thinking about humans leads to potentially horrifying conclusions. Just few weeks ago Poland introduced one of the toughest paedophilia laws in Europe. Without going into details the main point is: a convicted paedophile will be subjected to pharmacological castration. Proponents of this method say that only the ‘abnormal’ sexual desires are rooted out by drugs and ‘normal’ sexual drive remains. Sounds highly implausible to me but is easy to ‘sell’. Will anyone listen when a paedophile complains about losing sexual abilities?

What does it have to do with pipes and surrealism? Well, the functional way of thinking about humans is exactly the sort of thinking that leads us to believe that a paedophile will cease to be one if we take away the ‘function’ he (rarely she) performs. Forget history, context, genetic modifications in the brain, hormonal disorders and whatever else could possibly cause deviations – take away the function and he becomes a ‘normal’ person again. Just as some think that chopping of an arm will turn a thief into a non-thief. Obviously, deterrence is a big part of the rationale behind these sorts of laws but still, it seems like the functional thinking about identity is at work here.

Rene Magritte was a genius. No doubt about that. However, surrealism is much more appealing on canvas than in a syringe. More interesting as an idea than a functional policy tool.

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~ by urbanrichardlong on October 6, 2009.