Brutalism 2k18 What the F**k is Going On?

Title slide of my presentation. Image of the doomed Birmingham Central Library, June 2015. Photo by A.M.

Last week I spoke at the Nonument Symposium in Ljubljana, focussing on the way that 'Brutalism' is used and abused in contemporary culture. The renewed cult popularity of Brutalism is a phenomenon I've been observing with a mixture of fascination, enjoyment, ambivalence and disgust for some time and the lecture had a packed agenda. It was an attempt to try and decode the various agendas and interests circling around Brutalism and to track them. I analysed a range of examples, from internet culture to contemporary design to industrial music to science-fiction. Brutalism as a (life)style or even an attitude is arguably more 'sexy' and, for some, virtuous than ever, yet many of its most iconic structures are now being demolished or de-brutalised through cladding - a term now synonymous with the horror of the Grenfell Tower fire.

Image of the doomed Birmingham Central Library, June 2015. Photo by A.M.

All this raises many questions. Is there any stable, agreed perception of what Brutalism means and has it been systematically appropriated from the architectural community?

'The White Heat of Birmingham'. Photo by A.M.

How do discussions around Brutalism interact with and contribute to the digital and cultural wars that mark our reality? Who 'owns' it and who profits from it? What does it reveal and what does it conceal?

Image of the doomed Birmingham Central Library, June 2015. Photo by A.M.

I'll be returning to the subject in future, but for now, here are some slides expressing the key arguments I made. Many thanks to MOTA for organising a fascinating event.

Brutal(ist) winter in Ljubljana, February 2018. , June 2015. Photo by A.M.

4th Annual Mark Fisher Memorial Lecture 2021 recording

Thanks to all who watched the event on Friday, we all enjoyed it and were really pleased with the response, we were only sorry not to have more time for questions and discussion. Ludmilla Andrews did a great job of executing the film at great speed in lockdown conditions. My commentary for the film was written in haste over the New Year and recorded in the following week. It's a snapshot of the transition from 2020 to 2021 through the prism of Test Dept's work and Fisher's response to it.

P.C. Press and Test Dept

I've been working intensively on the publication of Total State Machine a book on the history of Test Dept, which I've co-edited with the group and Peter Webb. I've also written the introduction to the book, which contains a wealth of archival photos and documents plus tour diaries, new texts and exclusive interviews. More information on the P.C. Press website.

Ghostland review

A brief review I've published on the Goodreads site of an interesting recent book. It's relevant to a critique of hauntology that I'm currently working on ... Ghostland: In Search of a Haunted Country by Edward Parnell My rating: 4 of 5 stars This is a haunted and haunting book haunted by its own absences. The personal story it relates is moving and borne out of cycles of family tragedy. Yet this aspect of the book is sometimes at odds with the collective "haunted country" it seeks to describe and sometimes prevails over it. Ultimately, this is somewhat more of a personal and family memoir than a work of cultural and landscape analysis. The author's knowledge of ghostly fictions and the landscapes that have inspired them is not to be doubted. Yet oddly this knowledge sometimes promises more than it delivers. More than once, when he seems about to "grasp the nettle" and confront the dreadful "it" that animates a particular story, h...

Plural Machine

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