Sunday 21 February 2016

So, with the US Election process underway, and now a date set for the UK Europe referendum it seems like a good time to get Election Aesthetics going again. Once again, we're looking for submissions that note, analyse and otherwise consider the visual culture of modern politics - So please do feel free to contact us with ideas and contributions!

To get the ball rolling, here is a link to something less contemporary but no less fantastic. Joan Didion's essay 'Many Mansions' (published in the excellent collection The White Album) is a tour de force of journalism, describing the Governor's Mansion built by Nancy and Ronald Reagan in 1975. Never finished, the Reagan's never moved in, yet through Didion we see this vacant mansion as an exposition of the soul of what she termed the 'California Republic'.

Full text here, but below some extracts:

“It is simply and rather astonishingly an enlarged version of a very common kind of California tract house, a monument not to colossal ego but to a weird absence of ego… mediocre and ‘open’ and as devoid of privacy or personal eccentricity as the lobby area in a Ramada Inn.”
...

"‘Flow’ is a word that crops up quite a bit when one is walking through the place, and so is ‘resemble.’ The walls ‘resemble’ local adobe, but they are not: they are the same concrete blocks, plastered and painted a rather stale yellowed cream, used in so many supermarkets and housing projects and Coca-Cola bottling plants. The door frames and the exposed beams ‘resemble’ native redwood, but they are not: they are construction-grade lumber of indeterminate quality, stained brown.”

....

“The place has been called…a ‘Taj Mahal.’ It has been called a ‘white elephant,’ a ‘resort,’ a ‘monument to the colossal ego of our former governor.’ It is not exactly any of these things. It is simply and rather astonishingly an enlarged version of a very common kind of California tract house, a monument not to a colossal ego but to a weird absence of ego, a case study in the architecture of limited possibilities…flattened out, mediocre and ‘open’ and as devoid of privacy or personal eccentricity as the lobby area in a Ramada Inn. It is the architecture of ‘background music,’ decorators, ‘good taste.'”