Tim Thomas

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A Perfect World: An Account of the Process

This paper is an account of the creative process involved in the work “A Perfect World”. It describes a journey into the foreign country of new suburbs. As such it is a personal account that describes, in roughly chronological order, the ideas and reasons I had for making pictures of houses and mounting them onto pieces of fibre cement sheeting. It accounts for the visual and photographic style of the images as well as touching on the nature of photographic representation.

I live in a hot spot of new suburban development. I spent my teens on the edge of major cities, in neighbourhoods that identified themselves as suburbs and were thought of by myself and my contemporaries as a cultural wasteland. The suburbs were a place to escape from. The suburbs suited old people, our parents, for example.

More recently the metropolitan fringe has become the site of, “affordable” housing. If you want to live in Greater Sydney, buy a house on one income, and have a minimal deposit, then the metropolitan fringe is your only choice. Recent civil unrest has been attached to a suburban social order of high youth, and multi-generational, unemployment, social isolation of new immigrant populations, and entrenched poverty. In fact all the social evils that defined the problems of inner urban populations that made the creation of, and move to, the suburbs so attractive for the middle classes throughout the middle part of the 20th century.

When I was growing up in suburbs I could leave and move to the exciting and cheap Inner City. Now a suburban boy might not have that option because though the Inner City might still be attractive it is no longer cheap.

Not all of my contemporaries left the suburbs. Many of them acquired a  profession and bought houses in the same area in which they had grown up. For a long time I thought that this was strange.

But then I moved to Canberra.

Canberra is a designed city that, despite its having been conceived along early 20th Century ideas of a perfect city, provokes an immediate negative response. People outside the territory see it as a boring, dull, wasteland.  The same people, who perhaps would delight in the idea of a sea change or moving to a rural community where cultural opportunities are no better than Canberra, feel that Canberra is culturally dead. There are I suppose reasons for this. It might be due to the constant negative associations created by the news media that do not differentiate between Canberra and the Federal Government, or because it is in fact a dull boring wasteland. I’m not interested in making out that Canberra is a throbbing cosmopolitan hotbed of cultural activity, outside the major cultural institutions it isn’t, rather that it is no worse than, just for example, Turramurra, Albury, Bermagui, or Moree.

There appears to be a contradiction between suburbs as a cultural and social badlands, and Canberra, a Suburban city, as an expression of utopia.

One thing that is different about Canberra is the element of choice contained within the question, “where shall I live?”

Canberra’s population is by and large employed, well paid and well educated. Government schools provide real choice in education in every area. What passes for the Inner City is not the scary place of misguided slum clearance that other cities have had to contend with. The city is small enough and empty enough so that no where is very far from anywhere else. Average commuting times are in the 30-minute category. You can build your dream home and still be close to where you work. This is not a John Cheever world, in which two hours on a train is considered a reasonable commute when measured against the terrors of the metropolis.

This means that when choosing where to live, people do not have to work around the idea of a city that is already full of other people. To build a new house one doesn’t have to knock down an old house first, unless you want to (it has not escaped my notice that perhaps I like the suburbs more now than then, because now I am, like my parents were then, oldish).

To reconcile this contradiction between Canberra as a badland and Canberra as leaning towards utopia we could look at the representations of Utopia within Australian cinema. Nearly all of them involve space. None of them invoke the image of a perfect city. The space is seen as being necessary to living free from the constraints imposed by your neighbours. In Sons of Matthew (Chauvel C.1949) we have nation building away from the centres of population. Mad Max 2 Road Warrior (Miller 1981) finishes with the besieged community travelling North to get away from their neighbours. The Castle (Sitch R. 1997) re invents Dad and Dave on the social edge of the city looking to live in their own way. None of this is about a better society it is about the ability to choose. If Canberra as it embraces suburbia still provides choice about the way people choose to live, then what appear as suburban badlands can easily be, for the people who live in them, perfect.

*****

The work “A Perfect World” started as an investigation into material culture and the symbols of success as they pertain to junk mail advertising, which in turn came from an observation I made whilst watching Back to The Future Part One ( Zemekis R. 1985).

In the film the central character, Marty McFly, by going back in time and accidentally changing the circumstances surrounding his parents first date, changes his life in the present from dismal to perfect. The film shows us both these states so that we can see what was, in 1985, considered essential to the perfect life. As well as a TV perfect family Marty needs certain objects of material culture to show us that his life is now good. These include a new car and a modern, clean, well-maintained house. Marty himself doesn’t appear to change, he was always a cool guy but his life is now more to his liking, except that now everything is perfect he does not have to prove himself to anyone, a character flaw the plot uses to motivate much of his behaviour.
When I first saw the film in its initial cinema release there were only two time zones in the film, the present 1985, and the past 1955. The past was depicted using icons from the popular and material culture of the period and the present was, in 1985, just the present. However seeing the film again in 2003 a new time zone had been created, as a viewer I was in the present whilst the action takes place in the past and the further past. What had in 1985 been transparent had now become icons of mid-eighties popular and material culture.

The film had not changed, it had not in its creation made attempts at locating itself by using references to Jane Fonda style aerobic out-fits, and big foot sports utilities or the decline of the inner city. These are things that I recognise as being indicators of a particular time and place, just as I recognise, from other films, the indicators of mid 1950’s small town USA that are deliberately included in the further past section of the film.

The effect of this re-positioning of the viewer to a place outside not only the action of the film but outside the world of the filmmaker, was to underline the things that made Marty’s life dismal and then perfect. It cast a light on what were the mid-eighties indicators of success within material culture.

If Back to the Future Part One showed the material symbols of success from a 1985 perspective, then the junk mail worked as a catalogue of the present day equivalent.

*****

I am an enthusiastic consumer of Junk Mail, especially the catalogue style publications that advertise department stores, hardware, furniture and consumer goods. My pleasure comes from two distinct sources. Firstly imagining that I am going to either buy or conversely never buy, one of the goods advertised. In doing this I am playing a game of imagination in which I either, succumb to the temptations and imagine the pleasure of ownership, or, and this is more fun, imagine myself smugly superior to the advertising and its target audience which is obviously not me. In either of these scenarios I am recognising the goods as indicators of success. In the don’t buy option I am identifying the game of whoever has the most toys wins, as one that I am not going to play.

The second pleasurable feeling comes from knowing what is available, what are the different technical specifications of each item, where to get it and how much I might have to pay. This is very similar to the fascination of Pokemon’s (Nintendo 1995 – 2005) “Gotta catch them all” tag. I might not have the indicators of success but by golly I know what they are.

There was an element of finger wagging embedded in this junk mail fascination. I couldn’t see that the constant accumulation of stuff would ultimately serve any purpose or add to the gross national happiness index. Being encouraged to seek happiness in consumerism, and consumerism itself, were obviously wrong; at least, this was the received wisdom.

What I found most confusing was, if I found the consumerist side of retail advertising undesirable how come I couldn’t help but study the junk mail in great detail, poring over endless adverts for coffee machines, gas barbeques, huge televisions, stainless steel kitchen whatnots and power tools of every variety? Like a road accident, I feel compelled to slow down and stare, despite the absolute certainty that I will be upset by anything that I can imagine seeing.

Junk mail provides a get happy quick scheme by making the indicators of success appear available to every one.  The indicators of success appear to be things that men, especially, seem to be able to convince themselves that they need more than they need than a couple of weeks wages. The big barbie seems to have made way for the big telly in terms of junk mail space, but that might be seasonal. The advertising works by conflating the signs with the signified. A big BBQ becomes not the product of success but success itself, and happiness, and popularity, and the envy of your peers.

Junk mail carries the full economic range of things that we don’t really need, but come to believe we must have. So we can acquire the goods, the symbols, without actually having the associated success except in the acquisition of stuff. We can, if we want, measure ourselves by the signifiers rather than what they signify. This isn’t very important since there is always new stuff to get so we can never actually keep up unless we are truly successful in terms of disposable income, but it can be a very compelling illusion.

The most important part of junk mail advertising is promoting the store. Big barbies come and go but Big Hearted Bevin’s Bargain White Goods is forever. In Junk mail the goods are advertised by price. The store is promoted through the price, or promise of a great deal. Therefore the lifestyle side of the adverts is, when compared to a national TV advert for a bank or breakfast cereal in which great lengths are taken to replicate real life, only sketched in. The lifestyle being expensive to produce is tokenistic. These tokens are not a replication, or simulation, but iconic rather than indexical signs of life.
In Furniture advertising you will often see the goods arranged on a set. Not only the goods but also props that are signs of life are represented. The sort of thing that I’m talking about is the teacups on the coffee table or an open book with reading glasses next to a bed. Because of the cheapness, these signs of life are tokenistic. No one is really in the middle of reading the book, the owner of the teacups hasn’t really just nipped back to the kitchen to get a packet of biscuits. We can tell that it isn’t real but at the same time we can acknowledge that these signs of life invite us to imagine that the goods are part of our lives, the part in which we aren’t harried, stressed and screaming at the kids.
These signs of life and signifiers of success interest me very much in terms of their value as photographic objects and the meanings we attach to them. They become short hand representations for a perfect world, similar to Marty Mcfly’s perfect world at the end of Back to the Future Part One.

Having identified this idea of a perfect world and the signs of life they start to show up every where. I found them in two novels that I was almost accidentally re-reading at the time.

The Great Gatsby and The Quiet American provide examples of somebody witnessing another’s perfect world or the strivings towards them. In The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald 1953) I found an example of someone in the process of creating a perfect world using just the indicators of success that I have been talking about. Gatsby pretends to have a perfect world so as to attract the object of his heart’s desire. Gatsby has a big house filled with luxury and holds big parties to which many people come. Yet despite his public face he remains an enigma. As a true expression of himself, the house and the parties are a lie, and it is not surprising that this lie, in part, leads to his murder.

Gatsby’s house is an expression of what Gatsby thinks other people will like, it doesn’t reflect his own utopia. Instead he uses the indicators of success, a big house full of furniture, and signifiers of happiness, endless parties, to create an environment in which he is likely to meet his old sweetheart.

The novel contrasts Gatsby’s phoney perfect world with the no man’s land of the ash heaps, a half world that isn’t New York, nor yet the wealthy dormitory suburbs. People who live amongst the ash heaps appear to have ended up there, they don’t seem to have chosen to live there. It is questionable whether or not they have the ability to choose. Gatsby, since he has an ulterior motive in choosing where and how to live, makes a series of considered choices about his house. The result is not a perfect world, the girl is not there, but it is an image of a perfect world.

In the novel The Quiet American (Green 1956), Green examines how different cultures interact. Through the character Fowler, Green puts forward the idea that people can be different, despite the biological similarities of the ‘we are all the same under the skin’ variety, and over and above their cultural differences.

On reading this novel I became interested in the way in which it is possible for two people to have the same goal and expectations, in this case marriage and happy-ever-afters, whilst holding very different ideas of what these goals and expectations might be and contain. The Characters Pyle and Phoung both want the same thing, a perfect world, but their respective perfect worlds appear to us, if not to them, incompatible. That there can be multiple perfect worlds is a strange thing since perfection is usually considered to be best and as such exclusive. The statement of a perfect world really begs the question, perfect for what or for who?

Or to put it another way whose perfect world is it?

As a way of satisfying my interest in these signs of life, indicators of success and the question, “a perfect world perfect for what?”, I started to photograph the streetscape where I live and the houses in my street. The streetscape pictures included Neighbourhood Watch imagery, deciduous trees, garbage bins and my letterbox. I started to collect and photograph junk mail.

At this point I was imagining a collection of pictures that included all these elements plus a photographic key, that is some image that would make sense of, and provide clues to, the rest and act as a map. This image would contain instructions on how to navigate or read the text that was the other images. I made pictures of a supermarket trolley and a granny smith apple to act as this key.

I photographed the trolley and the apple in a very different way to the streetscape. I took these objects out of their context and put them against a white background whilst putting the camera on their level. The camera position was to remove myself from the picture as much as possible and the studio background was designed to make the objects into semiotic units that referenced only themselves in the manner of letters.

A conceptual filter would delineate the context in which we view the world, define the paradigm, sort the cultural baggage we use to decipher the picture, and may be as simple as a title or more complicated such as non-diegetic music in a film.

The filter would be a dialectic process in which “a + b = c where c >(a + b)” – or: “apples + pears = fruit salad”.

I wanted to establish a conceptual filter in the mind of the viewer through a series of images such that all the following images are interpreted with reference to the conceptual filter. I asked myself, what would be the effect of including concentration camp imagery as part of a perfect world series? How would the rail yard at Belson, or a supermarket trolley effect the picture of my street?

I made a series of work prints, stuck them on the wall, looked at them and made different arrangements, and became disillusioned with the project. What I saw on the wall was a series of pictures that individually were interesting, but, when I put them into groups, appeared heavy, strident with cliché and with no room to explore the meaning, beyond the puzzle.

In the face of my disillusionment with the project I did what any visual artist working in Photomedia would do, I made huge prints. The big pictures were between 1 and 1.5 meters on the shortest edge. The result of these large prints was to make me go and photograph more houses in different suburbs to create a variety of house imagery, and to turn to the scanner as a capture tool for the junk mail. The large prints showed the dot screen of the junk mail and I was interested in making more out of the CMYK dots.

I looked at real estate advertising with the idea of making enlargements from the real estate flyers and newspaper pictures. That I did not follow this through is due to seeing the picture of the houses as not being representations of somebody’s perfect world. The houses were between owners and had been shown, not as a result of the owner’s choice of a perfect world, but as Gatsby style honey traps. They were not anyone’s perfect world rather they were representations of what one person would think another would like, which is not what I was interested in for the houses.

At this point as well as searching junk mail for signs of life I was looking at the Tina Barney series, Theatre of Manners (Barney T. 1997), as a representation of affluence, and Edward Steichen’s promotional photographs for Kodak (Steichen E. 1963), that showed perfect Kodak moments. Both these sets of pictures are set up, they were not taken as spontaneous snap shots, yet one has more truth than the other and this truth is contingent on a reality within the picture. The advertising pictures are interesting but not because they show truth, they don’t, rather they point to a desire for a particular life, which the subjects of Tina Barney’s pictures actually have, and in their case does not look perfect. That their world does not look perfect is due to us being shown the people, and people are problematic since from them we deduce events, conflict, motivation, timeline, and hence narratives.

This difference between the Kodak Moments and the Theatre of Manners made me turn to the pictures of houses as being in some way truer than the junk mail and the streetscape. They were truer than the streetscapes that were composed and selected in camera to show particular things. In an attempt to make non-judgemental pictures of the houses I had isolated them and composed them in a very square format that gave emphasis to the sky at the expense of the context of the street.

I had not tried to demonstrate their three dimensionality nor to describe what I felt about them. Neither had I placed them within a context other than the curb and the road in front of them. This turns out to be important. If I were to romance the images at all, to create more than an indexical link at the time of capture, if I cleaned up the yard or positioned myself to make the structure more monumental for example, I would be, in effect, prejudging some one else’s perfect world, which would be problematic.

I did edit my pictures. I didn’t capture an image of every house in every street. I selected houses and pictures as examples of difference. There is an element of “Oooh look at this one!”

This leads to a truth in the house pictures that comes from the houses not from me.

What became apparent from the big pictures was that I liked the houses better than the junk mail and the key images. The houses had a portrait quality that appealed to me. They also showed a relationship between the earth and the sky that intrigued me as a metaphor for aspiration. So, after a period of trying to rationalise the other imagery and force it to do what I wanted, I sidestepped and decided to concentrate on the house pictures. Which made me happy about the project again.

*****

In order to make the connection between the houses and the many perfect worlds there are some things that we have to assume about the owners of the houses. Most of these involve their ability to make choices about where and how they live.

Suppose that Dick and Jane,(not their real names), have reached a point in their lives where they feel that they have all the bases, food shelter, clothing, health, education and so on covered. At this point they are in a position to make choices about the way that they live. They can organise their lives the way that they want them to be, rather than make do with how things turn out. They make choices about where they live, what colour their house is, how big their house is and how it is presented to the street. Sometimes they appear to take the default option and leave things the way that they found them. In doing this Dick and Jane, because of their ability to choose are making a choice, albeit a passive one.

For Dick and Jane to be able to make these choices they must have money to spare, and in the case of Dick and Jane this money comes from work. They don’t control their work, they don’t feel that they have any choice about work, but they do feel secure enough in their income to spend rather than save, and or live with large debt.

Further suppose that I were to stand in the street, outside Dick and Jane’s house. What I would see as I looked at their house would be, not only, an expression of how Dick and Jane see themselves in the world, but also of how they want to be seen by the world, in both their successes and their failures. The choices that Dick and Jane have made are here expressed publicly in the language of real estate, architecture, landscape design, and home husbandry.

The assumption is that all this choice and choosing means that Dick and Jane have, or are in the process of making, a perfect world, that is a world that suits them, and that I can see this world by looking at their house. A person’s house is hardly a world geographically, politically or socially. Dick and Jane’s Green Peace contributions acknowledge that the world is not perfect, and there is dispute about what the perfect world should be. They are not working towards ‘the’ perfect world but rather ‘a’ perfect world. It is a world in the sense that Sesame Street’s Elmo has “Elmo’s World”, and that “Tim’s World” deals with Tim’s stuff. That Dick and Jane are making ‘a’ rather than ‘the’ perfect world is central. ‘The’ perfect world is a chimera in the same way that tomorrow never comes, whereas ‘a’ perfect world comes with the ability to choose and effect those choices.

In Canberra the uber-Australian  suburban city, there is a population very like Dick and Jane. They are, by national standards, well educated and well paid. The city is small enough so that proximity to employment is not necessarily an issue so that these people really can choose what they live in.

As I stand in the road outside Dick and Jane’s house I am tempted to judge the house and through it them. I see the sum of their choices and I feel in a position to be critical or even scoff. I might be provoked to feelings of jealousy, or to ridicule Dick and Jane in terms of class or good taste or in the playful and anachronistic embellishment of an otherwise rather dull house. In doing this I am assuming that I know something of Dick and Jane whereas in reality I don’t. I don’t know them from a bar of soap, nor do I know the decisions and thought processes that have led to the house looking the way that it does. When I am tempted to judge I am forgetting that this is not my perfect world but Dick and Jane’s. If I were to learn more of Dick and Jane and photograph the inside of their house then I could judge, but in knowing more, Dick and Jane’s perfect world would begin to fray just as the perfect world in Tina Barney’s Theatre of Manners.

If I am to look at different expressions of a perfect world then I must distance myself so as to remain impartial. I cannot say that this perfect world is better or worse than that one, neither can I say, in the same circumstances, what I would have done differently. What I can say is “Fancy that” or “Have you seen this one?” I am taking the position of witness.

As a witness I can give you what I see but not draw conclusions beyond that some things are different to others. I don’t show you everything. The list that I give you has been edited. For every version of a perfect world that I show you they’re many more that I don’t. I want to show you the details that propel the story, or provide spectacle, whilst ignoring the humdrum. I restrain myself from judging Dick and Jane’s Perfect world because I don’t feel qualified. I am not in a position to know or even guess at the details that make up their life. If I were to do so then I would be relying on empathy which supposes that Dick, Jane and myself have enough in common for me to feel their feelings, and understand their motivations. This might be so, and on some levels it probably is, but I can’t be certain and without certainty I have to forego passing judgement, or even offering opinion.

Further, if I judge Dick and Jane I am denying them the right to their own perfect world. Or imposing my perfect world on them, possible for their own good. I can justify doing so if I have a strong enough belief in my own sense of right and power of empathy. But these can be horribly wrong…

An example of empathy gone wrong can be found in Dawn: A magazine for the Aboriginal People of New South Wales (New South Wales Aboriginal Welfare board 1952 to 1769). Dawn is a terrific magazine full of handy hints and tips on how to run a household, pay rent, grow flowers and vegetables, and be like a European. It was distributed among the Aboriginal people of New South Wales as a way of furthering the cause of their assimilation into the mainstream society, with the ultimate goal being that they disappeared as a group. From 1952 to 1969 it acted as manual on how to be a European and as instruments of genocide go was almost completely harmless.

Now the magazine appears wrong, it seems short sighted, narrow minded and trivial, but the people who produced it, The Aboriginal Welfare Board of New South Wales and the government they represented were not bad people. This was not an ‘ultimate solution’. Rather it was seen as helping people live better lives by helping them live European lives. The publishers knew that this was what Aboriginal People wanted because it seemed obvious, and what made it seem obvious was a feeling of empathy, where in fact no empathy existed.
At the time of publication the government policy regarding the Indigenous people of New South Wales reflected the belief that they would, with the passing of time, and in the company of the original inhabitants of the other states and territories, simply disappear. This was in accordance with, not only the Social Darwinist theories with which the Europeans made sense of their past and the continued colonisation of the continent, but also with the what seemed like empirical evidence presented by the indigenous people themselves, as they moved from reserves into town and fringe camps, in pursuit of their share of the country’s wealth and good fortune.

The magazine appears at best well intentioned, which it was, if you can have such a thing as well intentioned genocide. The publishers were sure that what they were doing was right, that they knew what was best and what would make people happy. Now the fashion has changed and the magazines can be criticised on many politically correct levels, but we can’t say that the editors and producers were bad people. They thought that they knew best and it turned out that they didn’t. The reason that they could make this mistake is that they assumed that everybody, given the chance, would like to be like them and that since the way they organised their lives suited them it was axiomatic that it would suit everybody else as well. It was beyond their comprehension that this might not be so. Any hiccoughs in the plan could be put down to racism by ignorant Europeans, or Aboriginal people slipping back in to their dark old ways, and thereby failing in their duty to progress up the social evolutionary ladder. But times change and Australia gave up assimilation in favour of multiculturalism. From where we now stand Dawn seems wrong in what it stood for, though for all that it is a terrific magazine.

When I was testing the “A Perfect World” pictures on people I noticed that there was an immediate discussion of the sort of people that would choose to live in which house.

Some examples made viewers question the good taste of the house owner. We feel very comfortable judging. We can pull apart the details. This house has too many columns, that has a fussy front yard. When we consider however that, as far as houseness is concerned, all of these are good houses, with a roof and walls to provide shelter, somewhere to cook and somewhere to wash, with enough room to fit all the people and their stuff, what we are faced with is, if I am to be generous, a confidence in our own sense of style, or if I am to be forthright our own prejudice.

I started with an idea that included a lot of things. I had a vision of them all working together, on the wall, as a post-modern treatise on the position of the viewer in relation to a visual text. The work was going to be smart, intellectual and demanding, not because of its content but because I was going to make it so. Then the work changed my mind. The pictures of the houses are themselves apart, separate from the other stuff that I was going to do. They stand alone without the need to derive meaning from a melange of signs and symbols of an affluent middle class. They don’t need to be surrounded by riddles and puzzles. Just as the houses are the sum of all the choices so the pictures are the sum of the research and ideas that make up the shaping forces of the project. The other ideas are there, but as a foundation, which I like.

The pictures don’t tell the viewer anything. They raise questions about the process without giving answers. What they do give are truths about the choices that people make. And it is through these choices that perfect worlds are created.

List of Citations.

Barney T. Theatre of Manners, Scalo, 1997.

Chauvel C. Sons Of Matthew. 1949

Green G. The Quiet American. William Hienman Ltd. Melbourne, 1956.

Fitzgerald F.Scot, The Great Gatsby. N.Y., C. Scribner's Sons, [1953]

Miller G. Mad Max Two Road Warrior. Kennerdy Miller 1979

N.S.W Aborigines Welfare Board. Dawn. 1952 to 1969

Sitch R. The Castle. Working Dog Productions, Village Road Show 1997

Steichen E. A life In Photography. Bonanza Books, New York, 1963.

Zemekis R. producers Gale B. and Canton N. Back to the Future. Amblin Entertainment, Universal Studios, 1985.