Thomas Hastings: 2011

Sunday 11 December 2011

Stairwell, Brooklyn Museum

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D U M P L I N G S

From pierogi to gnocchi, ravioli to festivals, dumplings have infiltrated cultures world-wide. Acting as a linkage or bridge, this robust foodstuff emanates the kind of trans-nationalism that goes to the root of American society: a land where everyone is from somewhere.

Cycling down Eldridge, I stopped off at Vanessa’s Dumpling House, bought a pork & chive dumpling soup, walked across the road to the Sara D. Roosevelt Park and found a bench amongst old Chinese men reading newspapers, women discussing with hands over the municipal table tops and children skipping around the adjacent playground. This collection of people, partially assimilated into the downtown hubbub of Manhattan and brought together through shared language and custom, produce a spherical space with its own incubating set of atmospheric conditions. Interspersed within this micro-community are the elasticized signs of an ‘American’ host – fraying baseball caps, showbiz weeklies and discarded candy wrappers – reminding me that I am in New York, not Beijing.

Dumplings serve as an index for the way in which two politically distinct nationalities can momentarily converge to form a contingent heterarchical community – as I found in the park – a space in which people are freed from the determining effects of cultural signification, and the nakedness of human life shines through. Why is this?

The dumpling is a token of a type of design: the gift. Typically, one ball of homogenous filling is enveloped by a layer of fried or steamed pastry. Insofar as a gift is actualized through use – i.e. the ‘reveal’ – the filling is an object concealed, nurtured and finally disclosed by a kind of protective skin. Together, these two symbiotic entities form a microcosmic gift-exchange economy, whereby the function of the product is determined by the way one chooses to eat it:

1. Cutting the dumpling in half figures the user as the receiver of a gift, who derives an infantile, discreetly sexual pleasure from revealing the ‘secret’ of the product.

2. Swallowing the dumpling whole, one mimics its cocooning design, assuming the stance of the mother archetype - or giver - whose mouth forms a third, womb-like protective layer.

Whether one is cast as the giver or receiver, the act of consumption implies an invisible, reciprocating other, who completes the oppositional binary:

mother : child

Like a nuclear reaction, this ‘other’ explodes inclusively outwards through an expanding chain of metonymic signifiers, mimicking the concentric structure of the dumpling and subliminally finding the image of its double through a range of inter-related signs:

Dumplings > Soy sauce > Chopsticks > Chinese-English menu > Spoken Chinese > Surrounding Customers > Waiter > Restaurant > Chinatown > Chinese Culture

Embodying an archetypal figuration of the mother that goes deeper than the purely connotative, the dumpling unleashes a pre-Symbolic potential energy that extends spherically outwards, transcending national differences and joining people together. This is why tables are round in dim sum restaurants and this is why every culture has its own version.

- Thomas Hastings

Friday 9 December 2011

Ariana Rubcic

Sophie & Eva Hesse, New York

Coney Island

Friday 21 October 2011

Why did Apple brand the death of Steve Jobs?

Thrift, thrift, Horatio, the funeral bak'd-meats

Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables.

William Shakespeare, Hamlet Act I Scene II

I do not have a favourite brand. Whenever I find myself drawn into the shiny matrix of a brand’s ‘look’, I become sceptical, questioning the tactics that have led me there. Of how that brand has managed to add to, overwrite and extend the identity of a specific product beyond its unmarked ontology: whether it be an object such as a camera by Nikon, or a service, as with the bank Natwest. Of how brands covertly seize upon social spaces and inflect the praxis of user-consumers, dynamically reconfiguring one’s relations to local environments and distorting one’s perception of archetypal experiences we previously deemed ‘sacred’. More than any other brand I can think of, Apple’s marking of technology appears the most integrated, seamless and beguiling.

Steve Jobs died on October 5^th. Walking along East Houston in downtown Manhattan two days later, on October 7^th, I watched a taxi drive past, top-sign emblazoned with an icon of Steve Job’s face, and accompanied by the text: ‘You changed the world’. How are we supposed to take this? Is Apple transparently empathizing with the collective feelings of the General Public for the death of a ceo? No. By extending their funereal operations beyond the prescribed space of the website, products and stores, and into the territory of advertisement, Apple has discreetly subsumed, mythologized and redeployed the death of Steve Jobs as a virtual, illuminated and endlessly circulating tomb, conflating the process of memorializing the loss of a loved one, with the directives of market strategy… and all within the space of two days. This is branding par excellence.

We think of Apple’s future as being dependent upon Steve Jobs. This is what the shares tell us and this is the crux of his fame. By supplementing his presence so soon after his death with the performative epitaph ‘You changed the world’ – preternaturally (re)membering Jobs – Apple tactically enunciates a binding command through the lips of a dead man:

do not forget me, do not leave Apple

This colonization of public space is actualized by the arbitrary movements of a taxi cab, which operates as a mechanized substitute for Jobs’ lived body. Transgressing one of the central oppositional binaries of Western civilization – life : death :: presence : absence – Apple fascistically converts Jobs dismembered body into an iconographical engine whose imminent death rites demand the attention of the urban masses.

If Rupert Murdoch died tomorrow, News Corporation would not be so willing to transubstantiate their ceo for the sake of some quick publicity. What Apple has achieved, in this co-opting of the spatial boundaries between life and death, is to put into action an accelerated paradigmatic shift, whereby death – the epistemological end-stop – is reconceived as a digitally-mastered, photoshopped mechanism for the advancement of consumer sales and brand loyalty. This is an actor-network relational pitch with a mobile centre of techno-orchestrated absence; thus spelling the commercial enfranchisement of death.

- Thomas Hastings