- each journey one takes traces a mesh that translates to our cage. We exist with the web of the journey - be that journey a daily path, or, the path through our lives. The linear 2D map approximates to much more than a journey between two points however, it charts and situates our thoughts in a grid onto which all others can find a reference and co-ordinates.
- after the rationalisation of the Modern, (especially the time-management of FW Taylor), the (re)introduction of meandering marks the postmodern dilution of the grid. In that po-mo twist, the old street plan is re-energised at the expense of the American grid and the Modern civic space.
- this radical geography approximates to the schlock humanity that postmodernity cloaks itself in as a reaction to an assumed inhumane, rational Modernity grown huge and awry. It marks the emergence of ‘community’ over totalising civic scale and marks humane London and the old European capitals as the cutting edge of pre-millennial cool.
- if the grid is all that is Modern, then the web - its irrational, organic other - is its postmodern nemesis par excellence. One must remember that the web is not chaos, however, but always is interconnected. It is the memory of the grid warped through time.
- in 1998 schemes applying for Arts Council funding are stamped with a uniformity born of their insistence on stressing community in a warped logic of nostalgia and shrewd marketing plays on buzz-words. [see also key ref: young people]. The notion of community is one bound up with the web and the attempt to re-forge it has to be seen against the oppressive backdrop of the grid, with its high-rise regimented refusal of the possibility of community. But community can not exist now, only as a romantic reference point, like the arts themselves. ‘Young people’, as a term, is merely a long overdue recognition of children as cannon fodder, feeding the Modernist death-machine. For compassionate appeal, the term ‘children’ is resurrected to appeal to our own multi-individual memories of golden youth.
- today’s body for policing the artist - The Arts Council here operates as the facade for a new economics - functioning as a monolith whereby artists have to prove themselves as businessmen, and businessmen can add value to their schemes by claiming artist status.
- community, outreach, accessibility are the new watchwords of art.
- Krauss dubs the Grid as ‘Modern Art’s will to silence’. The po-mo withdrawal of the grid and its sister, the (re)emergence of the city, the unstoppable rise of leisure (meandering), marks a loss of regimentation of order to a new sterner and much more subtle scheme. The Mediaeval street plan is organic and follows a recognition of the importance of the ordering body - the ‘veins’ of the lungs, the passages in the brain. It represents the Grid ‘humanised’ at a surface level/warped by narcotic masking agents at another.
- is the Grid more organic than the Web? One represents mans (re)ordering of nature/the other/the imprint of mans interior on an exterior space. The same thing? Is not po-mo then just Mo in sheeps clothing?
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