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Iit was my birthday last week, and being a laid-back country dweller with a sweet pea obsession these days rather than the urbane Dorothy Parker of yesteryear, I welcomed my appropriately tender gifts: flowers, plants, an original exhibition catalog from decades ago, some fragrance , promising to recreate walks on the beach. I counted among my blessings a recent eye test that showed no further deterioration, a continuous Duolingo (Irish) streak, roof repairs that seem to be holding up – what we might call the joy of things not getting worse, little ones triumphs that often feel disproportionately large and lucky.
That same day, Apple CEO Tim Cook appeared to suggest that I don’t really need all the funny little old-world analog things I hold on to. In an ad for a new iPad Pro – whose main attribute, according to the same, is that it is extremely thin, indeed the thinnest ever – the spectators were treated to a hellish sight: a platform crammed with musical instruments, cameras, games, paints, a gramophone, an artist’s mannequin, reduced to splinters and dust under a giant industrial crusher. Get rid of all that crap, he seemed to say, because here’s a gadget that makes everything obsolete.
Also on the same day, I found myself talking to someone on a podcast about the artist Eileen Agarwhose most memorable work is a wild, witty nautical-themed hat titled Ceremonial hat for eating bouillabaisse. That someone could come up with such an idea – so silly, so ridiculous, so strangely surreal and suggestive – and then execute it by actually collecting all the necessary pieces of coastal detritus and transforming them into a three-dimensional object is a minor miracle of persistence of imagination: the world doesn’t need a bouillabaisse hat any more than you do, yet someone made one and here it is, a beautiful artifact.
I’m aware of the irony: to get a better idea of Agar’s works, I Googled them, stared at numerous images, and followed links to various sources to read more about his creation. I interviewed someone about this via Zoom, our conversation was captured and refined using editing tools accessible across multiple platforms including An apple. Technology has helped me discover more about a work of art from a cultural moment and tradition that we might reasonably think would have dismissed it.
Apple’s great big crusher has enraged many who take it as a message of destruction, bliss and ultimate flattening: not only of the objects themselves – the piano, the paint pot, the reflective camera lens – but also of the creators who use them to express themselves and their ideas. Their anger and frustration is, of course, part of a context in which the creative arts and their practitioners are deprived of funding, threatened by relentless copying and piracy, deprived of political support, unrewarded and unrecognised.
Channeling Pollyanna, I don’t think it’s that bad. In honor of spring and another year on the clock, I took a journey from my home in the south-east corner of Ireland to the west this week, my best friend – a journey fueled by apples and Taytos crisps rather than Hunter Thompson’s psychedelic or liberating feminism of Thelma & Louise, but quite unbridled by our own lights. Each evening, stuffed with seafood, we staggered into a pub and came across a group of musicians enjoying a session, and although the hat was often handed out for coins to tourists, the performances seemed too festive to be a mere publicity stunt.
One evening, following the sound, we passed through what appeared to be an abandoned hotel, all the occupants neatly tucked up in bed, to pass through a door into a back bar, raised by noise and applause. On another, we sat in a small pub, listened to a soloist deliver a hauntingly beautiful rendition of On Raglan Road, and felt the mysterious beauty of Patrick Kavanagh’s ‘enchanted road’.
Is this incredibly romantic? Of course. Taking a boat to Inishbofin and wandering along the coast, we marveled at the way the islanders decorate their gardens with found objects, yarn bombs and elaborate bug hotels – but it was a nice day and it might not have looked so delightful, as is often the case in this part of the world, the rain was horizontal and the wind was strong enough to blow your ears off. However, in the warmth of the community center, there was an arts festival over the weekend, including a talk by a documentary photographer Billy Mundowa chronicler of Irish life, a resident of the island and a fierce opponent of smartphone cameras.
I guess that’s a way of saying that the desire to create can thrive in the nooks and crannies of the biggest halls and on the loudest stages, and that it doesn’t depend on the thinness of your iPad Pro. This is hardly news, but the brazenness of Apple’s ad vision is perhaps its most shocking aspect. The smashing of musical instruments and objets d’art presented not as an act of vandalism, but as a gateway to a minimalist, technologically enhanced freedom where doing something does not require understanding and gradual mastery, but the ability to manipulate images and sounds with speed and ease .
It could also be a way of saying that this is what aging looks like. Back home, with the aforementioned roof repairs still in progress – no operating system yet up to the task of stopping the leak – there is some internal turmoil. We are surrounded by the fruits of our commitment to analog: swaying stacks of books, stacks of newspapers and magazines, vinyl rarities being transplanted with kid gloves into storage boxes. It would be simpler, I suppose, if our enthusiasm was more easily contained by the M4 chip powering the latest tablet, but then where would we be? We sit under the damp rafters, tapping away at our screens in an empty room, that’s where.
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