Manifesto for Kitchen Towel
From Chelsea Wiki
MANIFESTO FOR THE CONTINUED MARGINALISATION OF KITCHEN TOWEL AS AN ART MATERIAL.
I want to make art on kitchen towels. Kitchen towels bear no weight in the world of art. They are light, idiotic, disposable, cheap. I can imagine a kitchen towel exclaiming “don’t pay poll tax” in bright felt tip colours being used to wipe gravy from the chin of a weary hackney councillor, thrown in the bin, collected by a man in a yellow jacket, chucked onto a barge and floated down the Thames bound for one of those unfortunate towns where Landfills creep up towards the precious two bed maisonettes of home counties residents who only just managed to get out of Hackney and now they have to live next to all Hackney’s rubbish. And soon their house will be buried over with it. Or I can imagine it being trodden into the scummy stairs leading to the platform in Edmonton Green Station; joining the grime and turmoil of hopelessness lodged in the crevices in the concrete.
At a party on saturday night I met a young man called Leon. We talked about kitchen towels and living in Tufnell Park 18 years ago. He said he saw kitchen towels as the first step in embourgeoisiement. When somebody starts buying kitchen towels, it is a sign that they have stepped across the border of wealth into the middle classes. I thought about my own life in London. As a child my parents were reasonably poor, my father was a writer and rarely had a steady job and my mother was a singer but gave up her career to be a full time mother. I don’t think I would have even known what kitchen towel was until I was about 11 years old and started going to the houses of other children in my school. The clean, neat, semi-detatched, double-glazed, suburban houses of the moderately wealthy. But it wasn’t the houses which really seperated me from them, it was the kitchen towel. I knew that my mother would never buy kitchen towel, just as I knew that I would never go on skiing holidays, have a TV in my room or get my ears pierced.
By the time I left home 2 years ago my mother had begun to buy kitchen towel. I can see now that this was the moment that my parents hauled themselves through the ceiling and into the middle classes. The major changes which coincide with my mother beginning to buy kitchen towel are extraordinary. My father had been working for Schröders for a few years and my mother had started up her own business as a music teacher. My father also had a business which he ran alongside his normal job, which was bringing in a moderate but regular extra income. In 2005, my parents bought a flat in Hoxton which I was to live in while I studied. I was to pay a small rent and live with other students, who would also pay rent to cover part of the mortgage. In the summer of 2006, my parents had their ex-council maisonette (which they had bought for a mere £42,000 under the ‘Right to Buy’ scheme, which Margaret Thatcher had implemented years earlier) entirely renovated. After the renovation, they also begun to employ a cleaner (which ironically, my father had always mocked other families in the area for, because of the allusion to status which supporting petty staff implied).
Today I begun to read ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being’ by Milan Kundera. In the first few pages he talks about the polarity of lightness and weight and the difficulty in assigning a negative and a positive to the poles. He describes lightness as floating, freedom, expression. Weight is burden, the burden of responsibility, security, love. Without burden human beings have no existence beyond a superficial transparency. One feels existence, one lives, through struggle. Kitchen towel is at once lightness and weight. It is a potent status symbol in contemporary Britian, it marks what are now often thought to be irrelevant and even non-existent class divides. Yet it is insignificant, disposable, cheap. It is absorbent, and cannot exist independently of milk spillages.
What also makes kitchen towel ‘light’ is its superfluity. It is thouroughly unnessecary, as spillages can easily be remedied with toilet paper or rags. It is a perfect example of a product of the Keynesian economics of fifties Britian. It was probably invented by Harold Macmillan and justified by the resulting generation of good honest factory jobs. In this way it is bound up by the regime of pointless jobs which we exist in, working far beyond what is neccesary for basic comforts. Employment is seen as being a noble justification for existence. The unemployed are ‘dole scum’, ‘welfare dependents’, ‘lazy idle schemers’.
It is an item which exists only as a result of consumer capitalism and which has been interpolated into our lives by advertisers. Kitchen towel enjoys a unique existence under these very specific conditions. One cannot imagine kitchen towel existing in any culture other than this. As it unfurls, square by square, its binary braille reveals a marxist meta-narrative; the end of history; a brown cardboard tube. The conditions for the development of such an absorbent superfluity, like those under which the primordial soup let slip, are singular and fleeting.
Kitchen towel is the side stepping of “art materials”. I try to avoid art materials shops as much as possible, because they make me feel like a bit of a pervert. It is much like going into a sex shop; an overdose of sensuality and lubricity; shuffling feet and averted eyes. In some ways, I feel more comfortable in a sex shop. At least there, there is no pretence that this is not an expression of perverse pleasure and materialistic desire. The feeling of a new pencil between your fingers; the smell of the binding glue in a new sketchbook, the sound of the pencil being sharpened for the first time. All these guilty pleasures are bound up inextricably with the experience of the art materials shop. They are essentially consumerist pleasures, the perversion of desire into object. Objects of desire. Inanimate objects transformed into subjects and interpolated with human characteristics. Box fresh anthropomorphic fetish.
‘Material’ can be used to describe practically any element of the fabric of the universe which can be consciously seperated or divided from the whole (the indivisible existential cosmos). The way we differentiate between objects, according to Proudhon, is through the series. Definition, order, and seperation emerge through the series. The mind groups objects together and divises individual elements. The imposition of such groups is to some extent arbitrary because it doesn’t matter whether you divide something this way or that, the thing itself remains the same. But the way we understand it differs. Therefore a certain amount of interpretation is in fact creation itself. Proudhon does not go so far as Barthes in saying that interpretation is sole creation. He admits space for the wholly engaged to be surprised.
What could demonstrate the dichotomy of division and consolidation more eloquently than the delicate perforations punched at regular intervals between every sheet on a roll of kitchen towel; at once, a whole, and the sum of its component parts? Before creation (perforation), is the chaos of the undivided universe. The black hole of non-existence, or rather, existence consolidated. Then, BANG! Division is the creation of existence. Division creates order and categories. Now we can see stars, planets, meteorites, asteroids, moons. The Proudhonian Series is the projection of division by the human mind onto things in the world.
The idea of an art supplies shop immediately assumes a privileging of certain materials. There are special papers and rolls of canvas, neat tubes of gouache and acrylic. All a material is, is a consolidated collection of physical qualities. Therefore it doesn’t make sense that “150gm Unbleached Norfolk A3” should be any more significant than “2 Ply Tissue 150 Sheets”. But clearly, it was decided at some point that the reaction of the qualities of the former with certain other materials were more appropriate to the work of art than those of the latter. Perhaps it is over-simplifying things to say it was decided. Certainly the qualitative judgement of materials is a cultural projection (as opposed to an instinctive knowledge.) However, the idea that ‘anything goes’ or ‘there are no rules’ in art is a fallacy. The vast majority of artists follow traditions and conventions extremely closely through their selection of materials. David Gross identifies an important development in the definition of tradition. Tradition is not just something that is repeated on the premise of it having been done before, but “[an act] becomes traditional when it was replicated precisely because it was performed before.” This is an important distinction to draw for the purposes of exploring the use of traditional art practices. One might take the example of painting. Painters are often asked to justify choosing to paint an image rather than photographing it, producing it digitally or drawing it. Painters paint precisely because it has been done before. The Tradition of which they form part already loads a painting with hundreds of years of history; imagery; convention. It would be ridiclous, then to say that a canvas is a tabula rasa, as equally as it would be to say the same of kitchen towel. Each has cultural and political significance. Each exists, is seen, interpreted. Painting on a canvas has no other significance, no reason for being beyond the fact that it has signified, it has been.
“never, you must never cap the prick you frig” MARQUIS DE SADE
The word ‘Material’ activates its subject by investing it with the possiblity of transformation through human manipulation. It is not the act but the investment of potential from the word ‘material’ to the object. When I say ‘kicthen towel is a material’, I invest it with the potential for creation. It is no longer a mere utility, but now, a possibility.
When you come to the end of your roll (it often happens all too quickly after one clumsy mistake), you will be left with a telescope to observe the stars. You will begin to feel as though you are part of something sublime. Beyond reason or comprehension. A severe ineptitude for understanding anything beyond the miniscule and insignificant grain of sand in which you live will become more apparent than usual. Turn your telescope upside down and it becomes a microscope. So powerful that you can see the atoms in your hand, the electrons whizzing around the nucleus. If you put your eyes right up to your hand without the microscope you start to see the cells in the membrane of your eye. Reminding you that your senses are limited to their apparatus.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Philosophy in the Bedroom Marquis De Sade 1740-1814 Grove Press: New York (Translation 1965 Richard Seaver and Austryn Wainhouse)
Cute, Quaint, Hungry and Romantic (The Aesthetics of Consumerism) Daniel Harris 2001 DeCapo Press: U.S.A.
The Past in Ruins – Tradition and the Critique of Modernity David Gross 1992 The University of Massechusetts Press: U.S.A.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being Milan Kundera 1984 Harper and Row Publishers Inc: New York
Interpretation and the Proudhonian Series Jesse Cohn Not Published
