Jack hardy

JACK HARDY

“A brush confronts an elephant and they discuss show business”

If a white elephant is not entirely functionless, it has at least lost the functions of its past. If it is in the ‘wrong’ place, then could it be moved to the ‘right’ place. If it has suffered neglect, it is not for lack of design quality or purpose or even deterioration in its physicality, oh no; its transformation, its re-becoming, comes from changes circumstantial or contextual, exterior, but not subjective. Meanwhile it patiently waits: ready and able, unchanged in substance but waiting for new qualities. Its boundary to re-definition defines it in the present.

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A brush confronts an elephant

We might not at first blame its neglect on its keeper, for turning grey to white, he is the innocent party in this contract, to be sympathised and not chastised; the elephant has failed her task, and she is a lumbering stray to be disposed of as swiftly and painlessly as possible. He tells us she might have worked harder: performed with the agility of lighter mammals, quicker on their feet and with greater foresight. The keeper thought she would last forever, her sure-footedness agelessness deceived him, deceived us. In the end, with inky black eyes absurdly small and watery to see very far ahead, a thick skull but saved her from a fatal crash.

On the other hand, perhaps both are victims of a shared calamity, old friends lacking in new tricks. Their fate is paired and directed forwards and downwards, curving towards a brittle collision. Together the elephant and her keeper form a knobbly old pair: cobbled streets, yet no charm. Sharing in each others’ weaknesses, if one will fail, so too the other.

But that too it is doubtful, the keeper could make amends; after all, aside her keeper our elephant was complicit with no one else, while he hosts many friends and makes many plans. Idle though they seem, his crimes include reluctance, irresolution, lack of foresight, lack of fortitude, and he is clearly no problem solver! The bulk of evidence is hard to ignore. What tale brought her into existence was his own, and he will re-tell it, bent and glossed like a cheap imitation. The fickle keeper; unable to train his grey elephants he expands his circus, filling a wheezing tent with oversold acts and faux-fur.

When the menagerie fails to draw the crowds any longer he is done with them, and their ridiculous vagabondage is exposed. Amongst the others, the elephant will be of no more use to her public, we only bought into her grey state - balanced a-top a ball and trumping in the spotlight. The audience won’t pay for a white elephant anymore than a silent soprano.

Whether or not her’s is a fortuitous dismissal for her owner; whether he found a new sponsor: someone with either short-sightedness or shrewdness sufficient for bold acquisitions such as hers, is, of course, not a particular to the white elephant. They part company without grace or reconciliation, for she is changed the moment she can be persuaded to move.

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and they discuss show business

Conception aside or assumed, for the time being our elephant waits, unable to muster the strength or resource to change her fate, and begrudgingly dragging her old toolkit into a new age non-befitting. She has surpassed direct and intended function, but it would be fair to say she is not useless.

Hanging around her neck: a quiet apologia in simplified sanskrit.

Being unused to uselessness, the white elephant is still. She whiles in politics and wallows in a quick economy: a tricky backbencher in the longhand of a deep-pocketed Rodney. The epilogue begins; time plays the role of an inescapable companion, whose critical afflictions demonise and condemn offering neither solution nor comfort - and all the while agonising her search for purpose. Not a homeless predicament, more like house-arrest. Her wait is a satire promising to reveal all the embarrassment of a public strip-search: she can but hide beneath a tatty purdah. One might imagine the desire to find function forthcoming for something used to usefulness; but without will what gives reason to substance - or: how to re-invent yourself. Who or what will find a function for our white elephant? Awaiting a windfall, the white elephant is still.

There is no brief, in her proboscidean present she needn’t enhance her emotional or political or physical surroundings; that is assured in the resources of the future, and the ignorance of the present. In fact, some would say freedom entailed - the haphazard liberati with no space for shame. Would you shed some skin on this, white elephant? What joys can you derive from bearing so large a luxury and not knowing where to park yourself. Certainly your bulk places you on our maps if not in our avaricious hearts. Your flummery rear-end is a humble adage: the inevitable dead-weight of a wonderfullyequipped head and shoulders. You are a forward facing creature by nature.

By extension, no quick fix, no gloss or bow or heightened performance can turn your fortunes absolutely to public’s content. In the case at Millennium point neither a winter wonderland nor a circus lifted the curse, we needed a corporate resurrection of the Rolling Stones to resurrect a tent shy of its pegs.

So how to re-appropriate oneself? On the wrinkly surface, where dried mud cracks over weary mechanics, there are few choices and little time; 3

A brush confronts an elephant

for the white elephant cannot be born anew in the material world: she is bound by her past, by the ideal form of a previous encounter with existence.

Her demise has left her cumbersome and unseasonable: a refugee in her own birthplace. Of her metaphysical state we might suppose that while her substance remains evident, she has lost her qualities to miscellany. Where did the white elephant jump off the Porphyrian tree: at ‘irrational animal’ or ’inanimate body’? In his Categories, Aristotle sought to establish a plenary list of the defining characteristics of all things. As with our subject-idiom: the ’white elephant’, more contemporary human anecdotes and allegories often emerge to fill gaps in such lists; finding anomalies with a simple conviviality to affirm their means. (1) In our case the occasion that gave rise to this particular irrational animal was one of the many trumpeted stunts of the self-titled ‘prince of humbugs’ Phineas Taylor Barnum. In 1884 he famously announced the arrival of a ‘genuine white elephant from Burmah (sic)’, complete with ‘the royal documents which record the transaction setting fort its genuineness’. Barnum boasted of the extravagant pain and expense to pry him from the ownership of King Theebaw of Burma, only to concede that his critics were correct, and unlike the white-painted elephant of his rival Adam Forepaugh: the ‘Light of Asia’, Toung Taloung was not the white object of myth perpetrated by the British Empiricists. (2) ‘Toung Taloung, the famous white elephant, which I brought from Burmah (sic), cost me $200,000. Like the public, I was greatly disappointed in him. He was as genuine a white elephant as ever existed, but, in fact, there was never such an animal known.

The white spots are simply diseased blotches.’ (3)

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and they discuss show business

If a white elephant is neither mythical nor actual, but somewhere in between, then it is surely an idiom for and of itself. The miscellany of categorisation it displays is only an accident of form, an appendage to its original substance, or else a chance removal from its prior context. It is not expressly material, it may be a promised event or deliverance, or a character trait belonging to another grander architectural arrangement.

The owners of white elephants are reluctant and inactive towards them.

They try to move on easily and can’t; they prefer to forget. If a white elephant is fed or kept with public money, then a public body is responsible for it.

Having multiple or non-identifiable owners lends likeliness to longevity for the elephant, since it survives on a diet of disagreement and irresolution. Its sustenance audited under the gaze of the public eye.

Some necessary atonement can often be gained from the virulent love affairs of the press, their public, and a good exposé. The record-earning baseballer Gary Thomasson came to inspire the name for a body of work by Japanese photographer Akesagawa Genpei in 1980, when he came to bat in the Nippon League for the Yomiuri Giants: ‘(Thomasson)...had a fully formed body and yet served no purpose to the world’. His record-breaking contract and track record were not sufficient to prevent his repeat swing-outs for the team, before a knee injury prematurely ended his career in the East. Genpei’s photographs found Thomassons, or useless urban remnants, in a state of celebration: these conditions or objects had not been changed or removed. Their presence was neither functional nor is it a hindrance to function, they simply did nothing, unobtrusively.

‘Just as humans have tailbones and whales have pelvic bones, cities have doors that open into a limb-breaking drop, segments of fences that anyone can walk around, and pipes that carry nothing at all’ (4).

White elephants differ from Thomassons: they are likely to be nonfunctioning, agreed, but they may be a hindrance, financially, or bad evidence, politically. To political correctness or propensity to reason, our white elephant tends not; to architectural perversity, and aberrant nostalgia, we find large regular footprints.

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A brush confronts an elephant

In 2009, LB Camden introduced a sudden herd of white elephants to the Borough, starting with a 7-strong ring-parade on the forecourt opposite the Freemasons Hall on Great Queen St. Phineas-Taylor would have had little trouble in raising the prestige of this display to legendary status. Camden’s bench, designed through commission by street furniture designers Factory Furniture, is an exotic intrusion on London’s public space and human comfort: it resembles a road blockade (and legally qualifies as one) and resists all nonsitting activities. It is a creature of undeniable hostility. It is impossible to: move, break, fix, sleep-on, hide-in, litter-under, skate-over or deface: a perfect embodiment of inertia. It is perfect and proud in its anti-object design features, and a commiserate white elephant to most bench-users. (5)

That it performs with perfect indifference to the city grants the bench its greyness in this essay: to castigate an object with such a limited palette of actions is unfair when it declines to enact them so effectively. It is the enigmatic mask at the ball. From the keepers’ perspective, it is frankly impossible not to look after: it’s unyielding dismissal of everyday wear and tear is impressive.

Try breaking that one, young perpetrator of fear and criminal activity!

The Camden bench is a classic exercise in a very Londonesque objective impartiality, deaf to reason; like a gross evolution of K6 telephone box, where no reliance on sentient interaction is required: calls make themselves. Camden achieved remarkable acuity in addressing the insensate needs of its streets 6

and they discuss show business

with this herd of elephants. A rude elephantine bulk it is; a white elephant it is not. This is for the fundamental reason that it has been raised ignorant to maltreatment or malnourishment: it won’t cost you a penny to leave it where it is, and indefinitely never need replacing. Surprisingly, in a city which sets records in the value of tiny pieces of land, it can be useful to have big solid blocks of useless matter lying around. In one thousand years, rubble, fibreoptic cables, steel railway lines and camden benches will be unearthed and examined and used to define C21 life - the beginning of the end of materialreliant infrastructures. ~ One day in February, 1998 Prime Minister Tony Blair, holding a lead attached to a strap around the midriff of a glorious white elephant, arrived to Greenwich by foot from Silvertown Dock, the Port of London. On announcing that Greenwich would be the focus of the world at the dawn of the new millennium, he said of the elephant ‘…nowhere else is doing anything like it, and it promises and will be, the most fantastic day out in the world’. (6) On a practical note, it was reasoned that firstly, the elephant might easily negotiate the choky walk through the New Blackwall Tunnel, fitting as it did within current width and emission restrictions; and secondly, if the crucial pre-election window had passed before the elephant had arrived from the Guruvayur Temple in Kerala, the John Knight ABP Animal Rendering plant had agreed to process the skin of the white elephant into a limited run of embossed Labour Party commiseration belts for members, and for posterity.

A court of British designers, architects, contractors and sponsors were assembled to dress the elephant. Her sequinned drapery was a fine work

by Richard Rogers, whilst a momentous millennial show, scored by Peter Gabriel, was created by the originative Mark Fisher, and praised for its use of synchronised aerial acrobatics.

Her future was not, however assured, and so sorry, then, for Mr Blair’s friend, Peter Mandelson, whose grandfather Herbert Morrison had masterminded the fondly (perhaps, unwisely-) recalled Festival of Britain, and whose ambitions 7

A brush confronts an elephant

had been thwarted by an elephantine identity crisis. In the end, the optimism of leading a great and beautiful creature to squat on the muddy marshes of Greenwich Peninsula stood as a long and inflammatory saga of clandestine dealings, and a loving keeper she never really found.

Allegorically, the elephant, a sagging dome-backed pachyderm, lent herself with fervent vigour to the satire of her own demise. Stories revealed the corrosive peat under its perch on the peninsula; the ‘bloated’ promises of ‘hollow’ men patching a ‘fraying tent’; the lobbying scandals of empty-headed Prescott and the hot air of Mandelson; even the countdown-happy symbology of the structure routed her firmly in the past-moment (twelve 100m masts; 365m in diameter etc.) (7) It is unclear whether or not private keepership has turned the white elephant back to grey, certainly the brushed iodised steel and anodised aluminium appeal of the peninsula in Greenwich blurs the two tones. However (and thankfully) the millennium dome still seems to crave the cheap thrills of circus life in all its idiosyncratic totality. With New Labour still suffering from the failed optimism epitomised in the dome, The inheriting government have looked on through a mask of equitable decorum as the private new keepers have re-invested, occasionally lending a coach park here, or obliging a new opportunity area there.

During the especially cold winter of 2004, the white elephant showed some sense of the nobility claimed by the premier proprietor P. T. Burnam in the 1890s, and sheltered over 700 of the Capitol’s homeless for the festive period.

Anthropism aside, however, inefficiencies loiter in even this nativity as it allegedly took the work of four thousand helpers to clean the elephant up for these seven hundred needy souls.

In recent years two baby Dumbos have been delivered to the site: firstly, the young Emirati zip-wire landed with a murky splash, and more recently, Up on the Dome gave the Mayor of London another excuse to harness up in a compromising public position.

What the proximity of Westminster granted to the Millennium Wheel, 8

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Royal Greenwich Village did not grant to the dome; and has chosen to frolic with populist stars and money in recent years, ‘…although nature has given the elephant a covering that resembles mud, the elephant itself chooses a coating of dust - like a virtuous man who finds joy only in the ways of poverty.’ (8) ~ What of the elephants charge in this scandalous interplay? What would she say? With eyes optimally safeguarded from peripheral glare by impressive ivory shields, freeing me of interventions from the left and barrages from the right; I am, too, blind to self-justification. My rationale is another burden on my keeper. So long as the great surge of my back-end continues, irregardless of protest and leather-worn to pricks and prods and preachers: if I have been set in motion, given purpose however futile, I will lumber on ’til my keeper is either venerated or crushed. Needless to say, this foolhardy trajectory results in dented egos, trampled ideals, and a big pile of shit landing in the shadow of our carousel.

Has anybody designed the post-parade clean-up to collective satisfaction. If my initial charge is missed, onlookers scarcely believe it was worth the hype.

For those that never saw the curtains lifted, for whom knowledge of the best of me is second hand, I am not more than the opportunity cost of the space I occupy. I am only known as the white elephant, not the noble elephant, the wise elephant, the performing elephant. The giddy faces of a crowd, at first impressed by the exotic; the erotic and the hypnotic, soften and fade like the thin paper tickets for my shows. There is of course great value to be had in the final performance of the elephant. I have cited the Millennium Dome Show as a spectacle to be admired and remembered. Similarly, Danny Boyle made waves with his wildly audacious opening ceremony at the twenty-twelve Olympic games in London; a lofty tale of Britain to-date: a best-of pastichefetish on the world-stage. A notable difference in the Olympic effort: the post-program-crunch felt under the tent in Greenwich was studiously avoided in Stratford; a quango committee including real experienced professionals was brought in to ensure every structure had competing buyers post-games: stadia sold as dynamic products, overtly nimble in their constructions and busy with publicly funded programmes for community use.

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A brush confronts an elephant

There is always one, however (again, a gift from India).

We have above sought definition for the white elephant, I have made grody remarks to its physicality, its heaviness, its dumbness, its short-sightedness.

I have swept out wide and branchingly, exercising my bipedal privilege, leaving little defence for natures grace. There are many white elephants,

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however, which do garner curious supporters, which soldier on aching and wheezing with a haberdashery of consoling voices - supporters who would willingly undertake the absurd - smooth out the wrinkled skin and make us believe again. Convince us, as did the Regent of Elephantology Pascal Varejka in his pataphysical journal Characteristics particular to the European Elephant, that beasts so fantastical do or did indeed walk among us. It takes belief in absurdity to see value in non-products; Varejka, himself an absurdist, says the European elephant ‘..is after all…so doggedly multi-faceted and so mulishly chameleonic that it remains difficult to grasp, and therefore describe.’ If we can grant credulity to this chameleonic product, re-animated from iconographical sourcebooks, then where does the defence of misplacement get lost with an elephant: white? (9) Sparsely, on the longer views of any architectural timeline, does a white elephant appear for more than short blasts; these white elephants belong in the controversial columns of urgent front-page news; instant; boldened and blackened with ink too thick and permanent for the paper on which it’s printed. Our immediate fear is that we will be lumbered indefinitely with her flatulent presence, but this is not historically true: we have a tendency to deny bad odours; fling open windows. The elephant in the room is leather-beaten, thick-skinned and unshakable: yes; but permanent: no! This idiomatic cluein-the-room about our human nature suggests that leaving the larger problem too-long unmentioned leads us, more often than not, to dispel it with actions of real permanence. Maybe it is necessary for architectures of real permanence to undergo periods of uselessness to test their affinity with longer existence?

In lieu of the above, it is difficult to imagine the consummate agreement between the white elephant and her keeper which would honour and satisfy each into perpetuity. One of these characters will inevitably succumb, and leave the other to either find fruitful enterprise elsewhere, or perish.

Reasonably, I too must bring death to my white elephant in the space of this script. Unless I am able, as might a great storyteller with her tales or a tamer of animals with his charm, to enrapture my audience and convince them that the white elephant can enjoy an unchanging mecca, I must step in to abstract her from terminal whiteness. I can only hope that through carrying out this messy chore I might better understand the wisdom of making a corpse of the 11

A brush confronts an elephant

concept, and take a just step in the spirit of George Orwell, who wrote ‘As soon as I saw the elephant I knew with perfect certainty that I ought not to shoot him’.

Recalling an episode of his service in Burma under British empirical rule, he found himself succumbing to the expectation of his office and the estranged will of the Burmese crowd, and, aiming his rifle at the enraged elephant, ‘… poured shot after shot into his heart and down his throat.’ Afterwards, he mused ‘I often wondered whether any of the others grasped that I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool.’ (10) That the spiritual immensity of the creature gave the occasion an iconoclastic solemnity was key to Orwell, who reflected it in his understanding of the ‘… real motives for which despotic governments act’. Precisely: this top-heavy idiom could only reach a stable logic through collapse, and much of the large and unpredictable in nature does tend to collapse - when we are talking in terms of buildings and cities, and the institutions and markets that occupy them.

Taking for myself the luxurious position of the paper strategist, and in consideration that my elephant is white and not enraged, I can propose that to ‘kill’ it is to find for it a purpose which brings about the greying effect. For a head of hair, grey signifies the wisdom of experience, where white betrays senility or obsolescence; so too for the skin of the elephant. To bring about the death of the white elephant is exactly as desirable as its replacement.

Whether they are really one and the same thing is a measure of the architect’s lightness of touch.

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Bibliography (1) Aristotle. (1998) ‘The Metaphysics’. New Ed Edition, London: Penguin Classics (2) Barnum, P. T. (2010) ‘The Wild Beasts, Birds and Reptiles of the World: The Story of Their Capture’, Montana, US: Kessinger Publishing.

(3) Amato, S. (2009) ‘The White Elephant In London: An Episode Of Trickery, Racism And Advertising’, Journal of Social History Vol. 43, No.1 (4) Allen, G. (2008) ‘On Tomason, Or The Flipside Of Dame Architecture’, Accessed 10 December 2015, greg.org (5) Foot, T. (2014) ‘Studs to beat the homeless?’, Accessed 20 November 2015, camdennewjournal.com (6) Blair, T. (1998) (Television). ‘Tony Blair Lifts the Lid on Millennium Dome’, APTV 24th February 1998.

(7) Toynbee, P. (2006) ‘A hollow man and an empty tent’, Accessed 18 November 2015 (8) Breton, A. (1997) ‘Anthology of Black Humour’, Translated by Mark Polizzotti. Los Angeles: City Lights Books (9) Varejka, P. (2015) ‘Characteristics Particular to the European Elephant, pub. in Journal of the London Institute of Pataphysics’, Number 11, Clinamen 142.

(10) Orwell, G. (2003) ’Shooting an Elephant: and other essays’. New Ed Edition, London: Penguin Classics

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