The quintessential artwork of the moment: Ai Weiwei's handpainted ceramic sunflower seeds in the Turbine Hall at the Tate.
Fresh start, new beginning, whether you wanted it or not – no 2s, just one, seule, seul – even that gender dichotomy, the question of the e, insists on an other – but that is for tomorrow; this is the day of fresh, pristine, snowlike, white, Oneish beginnings. From here, anything can happen, and will.
By tomorrow there will be a 2 in the case, a lovely, yellow, feminine numeral of possibility – it will come like the footprints of a bird across today’s mono blank. It makes odds and evens possible, and combinations, dance steps, reasoning, matching, difference.
One on its own is boys under streetlamps, it’s the denial of any possible complication. See those straight lines – some perpendicular and some tipped over – they’re hard, unyielding, but not quite sure what they’re doing on their own, trying to look more together than they are – no soft edges, except the serifs that underscore how much better the numerals are doing there than the slashes. (Slashes, when did we start using that word? We used to say “forward slashes,” and before that I’m sure we said something more polite, a proper term.) A 1 shorn of serifs is a sad thing indeed. Eric Gill made no distinction in his Gill Sans between a lower-case L, a 1, and an uppercase i. That is the return to first principles. The stripping away of everything until all you have left is the skin you stand in; it’s an architectural enterprise, the profligacy of someone for whom there’s always more 0ut there.
On the other hand – but there is no other hand; today is one, un, uno, unus, eins, een, én, et, ett, один, ένα, فرد, egy, jeden, jedna, üks… it’s a monolithic return to the beginning. It’s all in plain black and white. Maybe there is more out there, but it’ll be a challenge finding it, and I think we have to ask the question: “more what?”
Tomorrow will be different with its little tentative ray of sunshine, but I think today we need to look at the decade to come and try to imagine ourselves at the other end of it. The one thing we know is that 2011 is going to be a year of changes. This year I didn’t hear anyone saying the usual New Year’s things: the laurel-resting, the optimistic things. No one’s really talking about the coming year at all, and about 2010 we seem to agree it’s least said soonest mended.
As Gav next door was saying last night, it’s the end of a dickhead – and the start of a new earache. Hear, hear.
Maybe the thing to do is to embrace the new code, which is cracked and has no fixed meaning. Yet. We know we’re in the throes of something, and each of us is far smaller than it is. Each of us on our own feels powerless at the moment. But the thing to do has to be to embrace that, as the saying goes. In a year nothing will be the same as it is now. Maybe the thing to do is to decide that in a year nothing will be the same as it is now. Meet it head-on, charge into the changes, aim for the epicentre. Treat 2011 as a game of chess, and l/l/ll as the moment after your opponent has made the first move. I think the time to roll with the punches has gone; it’s now time to take the bull by the horns. Here they are: l l.
I know, I know: none of this is very Baroque. I have to get my aesthetic in place around all of it, dust off the CV, think about money, and start walking in a direction with an air of great purpose and density. Destiny. Fairy dust. Glittery. It’s all swirling around the place, and today’s the day to try and get some of it before it settles and turns to someone else’s possibility.
The good news is that tomorrow is 2, and it is a binary, wherein combinations will follow. Combinations sound Baroque, don’t they? And Mr Binary himself, Mr Future, the “radical pessimist” (and, I suspect, secretly baroque) Douglas Coupland, has many things to say about the coming dickhead, the new earache. Unfortunately his ideas do sound like an earache, but I think you’ll be interested to read about them. Even based on my own experience of the past couple of years I have to say I think he might be largely right. And surely if you take pessimism far enough it becomes a kind of optimism. I’m sure we can make this happen.
{ 1 comment }
Dear Katy
A thought-provoking and well-written post! One represents the positive sun, heat, maleness and yang in the Chinese Tao. Two represents the negative moon, cold, femaleness and yin in the Chinese Tao. But you know all that. This ought to be a better year than last but with the Tories in power, we all know that it won’t be.
Best wishes from Simon