20 September 2008
the ghosts of presents past
[All haunted paper images created by ICJ in the pub on Sunday with the help of newspaper ads and a rubber (that's an 'eraser' for my American friends). All photos of billboard ghosts by me, obviously]
England is famously the most haunted country in the world. While all that is solid may have melted into air, particularly of late, as savings and mortgages evaporate into the ether, there is a residual kind of heaviness to our cities, even as their specificity is subsumed under identikit shops and forms of employment that could be done anywhere. This leftover past is marketed as 'history' to tourists, bemused as to why all the pavements are really small and why it costs £5 for a horrible sandwich. The National Trust and English Heritage, with their over-staffed prissification of manor houses and obsessive protection of pre-historic sites, perversely destroy the darker side of this nation's history, such as that recorded by English Heretic with his black plaques (a joyously grim counterpart to English Heritage's blue plaque series). All the official ghosts have been rounded up and tagged...
Ads observes in passing that it would be much harder, though perhaps more interesting for this very reason, to formulate a hauntology of New York. The 'old' York is of course overflowing with spectres, several competing nightly ghost walks, and at the last count they had 140 officially recognised spirits...
But ghost stories are strangely comforting...Far more disturbing are the ghosts of the present: the architectural spectres of the billboards, adorning the sides of luxury flat developments that may never now get built. These corporate, contentless bodies that populate public spaces, waiting for history to begin again...
Even when some kind of realism is attempted, cheap body doubles appear; the women with the red bag and red top stops to talk to a couple, horrified to see her future self five seconds in the distance.
This mysterious man - a mafioso of the old school, or perhaps its more contemporary Russian variety - stands at the bottom left of the architectural projection, menacingly regarding the construction as if his very financial security depended on it...but perhaps it does...
An advert for domesticity made morbid in facelessness. The present makes a dubious pact with its future and comes off badly. No need for nostalgia, even, as the failures of the future are already with us.
