C.D.s and Other Things
By Peter Lyssiotis and Gyorgy Scrinis
Masterthief Enterprises, 1993. 52 pp., $7.50
Reviewed by Anthony O'Donnell
"Only connect." This injunction of E.M. Forster's (I think) is as good a fulcrum as any from which to launch a critique of everyday life. When the Melbourne Age headlines trumpeted three years ago "It's Final for Vinyl" I was probably too much a victim of false consciousness to see the world-historical significance of the triumph of the CD. "Only connect." Was it not also the year of the breaching of the Berlin anti-fascist protection wall?
The title essay of this collection of words and pictures has since put me straight. To some, its sweeping claims may read like a parody of the academic essay, which is a worthy achievement in itself, although perhaps better done as a mock grant application for a research proposal: "Angels over Berlin. The Collapse of Communism and the Digitilisation of the Modern Mind: Notes Towards a Taxonomy".
Never mind. The point is that startling and polemical juxtapositions might sometimes be the best way of cracking the dominant logic that frames our social lives. In which case, the short essays of Gyorgy Scrinis find a good companion in the photomontages of Peter Lyssiotis.
Scrinis casts his net wide, scrutinising economic rationalism, the commodity form and the triumph of the market, new technologies, notions of "sustainable development". The ideas will be familiar to many Green Left readers, but, in an attempt to be accessible and make connections, are put in so pithy and simplistic form as to likely provoke debate and opposition. Well and good.
The art of the photomonteur is likewise provocative. Lyssiotis takes the detritus of late industrial capitalism — the barcodes and derelict and wasted sites, and juxtaposes them with the human form. Again, the result is a defamiliarisation, a cracking of the logic.
The book closes with a selection of quotes from Ilya Ehrenburg's The Life of the Automobile, first published in 1929. Ehrenburg's polemics ("The automobile has come to show that the heart is just a poetic relic"; "The automobile laconically runs down pedestrians") exhibit some continuity with Scrinis' aphoristic critique of everyday life. Again, the car figures in Scrinis' essays as a twin totem of both environmental disaster and a technology that attenuates our human relationships in modern society.
Perhaps Lyssiotis and Scrinis are more troubled by contemporary life than the theorists and photomonteurs of the 1920s. This is because they recognise that the mechanical has been superseded by the digital, just as science is now increasingly intervening at the level of the genetic, the stuff of life itself. To leave it at a critique of the car would be to replay 1929's greatest hits, as the authors suggest.
There is a need for modern pamphleteering — verbal and visual — that addresses the changes in contemporary life. The appearance of this attractive, strange, polemical, provocative book, independently published and self-financed, rises to the challenge and is a sign of hope.
C.D.s and Other Things is being launched in Melbourne on Wednesday, December 8, at 7 p.m. at the Brunswick Mechanics Institute, corner Sydney Rd and Glenlyon Rd. All welcome. The book can be ordered by calling (03)387 7092. It will also be available from the Resistance bookshops in Melbourne and Sydney.