The image in my blog header is a work of art entitled The History of the World, by the 2004 Turner Prize-winning artist Jeremy Deller. Deller is probably my favourite contemporary artist, responsible for works such as The Battle of Orgreave, in which he invited a historical re-enactment society to re-enact the violent confrontation between police and picketing minors in 1984 in Orgreave, South Yorkshire; and of course the Stonehenge bouncy castle.
Of The History of the World, Deller says ‘I drew this diagram about the social, political and musical connections between house music and brass bands – it shows a thought process in action’. (www.jeremydeller.org) But, as I was pondering last week’s DITA session, it started to look like something else to me. It looks like a web. It is a web. It is a network of information. It’s a database laid bare; an index to a world where you can go from bandstands in northern parks to Kraftwerk via the Miner’s Strike in a just a few easy steps.
I love music, and fashion, and I have always been interested in social history. I am becoming increasingly fascinated by the way socio-political issues are addressed by the popular culture of the day; how designers are influenced by street-style; how pop music can be a rallying cry against injustice. And in my world-view it is all interconnected. And as we learned in DITA last week meaning is always contextual, and always cultural. No form of discourse is hermetically sealed. We are always searching from a biased starting point.
In the light of this, my thoughts drifted towards the notion of sub-cultures. Punk. Mod. Rocker. Goth. New Romantic. This instinctive yet overt tribalism seems to me to be a very primal and deep-rooted aspect of what it means to be human. It is something I consider to be very important in understanding the world. So it follows that I might want to research it further, to analyse and investigate and feed my findings back into other areas of study. But how? There have been many books written on the subject, including Street Style by Ted Polhemus, which is as close as I will ever get to having a Bible.
There is also this website. However it makes me itchy because it isn’t ordered or archived in a coherent way. And really, how can something as fluid and subject to mutation be indexed? Is it the impossible task? Can we ever start to think our way towards a taxonomy of sub cultures?
The Tangled Web 