A Model Power

At the end of the decade which saw Silvio Berlusconi, Italy's Prime Minister and one of Europe's richest men, hospitalized by a well aimed plaster statuette of the Milanese Duomo it may be relevant to ask; what power can a model have?

As countless images of the bloodied leader of the People of Freedom Party's attested a model can have a powerful impact, yet it does not need to be launched over the heads of the celebrating political opposition to do so. Models hold within themselves the promise, false or not, of reclaiming control of our environment.

The museum model and the architects model allow us to travel backward or forward in time, yet remain profoundly other and omnipresent in these miniature worlds. However as dislocated as we might be through scale from these temporal projections our immersion in their compelling intricacies can blind us from where their power lies. In the architects model it is a fundamental feature but it is equally true of the museum model that they are designed visions of both our past and future which reflect the prevalent ideologies of society : These established representations of the past can tell us as much about contemporary desires for the future as the models of the future can reveal the how and importantly the why of our understanding of the past. Even the material construction of their form, finished woods and lustrous plastics, planes of primary colour and layers of interactivity speaks the language of the desires created by the larger world that houses them.

In contrast to these official models, validated by educational/research institutions and commercial interests are the trainsets and tabletop war games, dolls houses and construction toys that are built as hobbies and pastimes the world over. Here the act of model making is a specific, intense involvement with the act of re-creation, an obsessive relation to the material intricacies that aspires to the power of the creators of the more culturally prominent social narratives. Yet as this form of model making moves from childish play to an adult fixation the motivation inevitably becomes escapism, the retiring from a reality whose control remains always beyond one's grasp to the compliant and ever malleable miniature.

However, unlike official models these hobbyist endeavours rarely manipulate contemporary society's visual language. Instead it becomes a perverse form of escapism as its power is almost totally expended in an impossible quest for an imitated realism; the trainsets and modern battlefields descend into a downward spiral, one that entails considerable financial expense, of a painstaking and unending effort towards a yet more precise realisation of reality. Even those forms of 'amateur' model making that echo the projection of the museum and architectural model, the ultimately disdained science fiction and fantasy constructions are locked down by an obstinate adherence to rules both physical and aesthetic that can be easily traced back to societal ideals. It would seem here that presented with a blank canvas for a parallel dimension no change can be envisioned, rather a simple recreation of the world from which escape is sought is settled for as the basest illusion of regaining control.

For an amateur model making that might approach the power of an official model it is worth returning to a cruder and altogether less diligent approach. A child's model made from the easily accumulated detritus of everyday life draws comparison with Kurt Schwitters collection of rubbish in the street for his Merz artworks, but in an age in which an unrivalled sophistication in visual language is employed in the production of even the most temporary of objects this construction can contain an explosive charge. In comparison with the meticulous involvement of the hobbyist the child's relationship with the materials at their disposal shows an encouraging lack of respect; Unnecessary packaging, objects rendered useless by fashions or in-built obsolescence are shorn of their exchange value and are changed by the child into whatever they desire. Product design and its constellations of packaging and marketing imbues its objects with an aesthetic which is symbolic of society's material desires, yet the child model maker's subversive act is not to reject this symbolism but to embrace it whole heartedly. Rather than passively and unconsciously slipping beneath the waves of visual stimuli they take it at its word: A sleek and complex sports drink bottle, redolent of post-war space-race momentum becomes, with little alteration, a spaceship. A bag-less vacuum cleaner ornamented with plastic tubes and crenelations rises as an iconic skyscraper in the centre of a financial district. An angular promotional pen is secured as a garish and deadly missile propelling an incomprehensible warhead.

In this over-association the model regains its power, rather than an obsession with an exterior reality the associated symbolic is pulled to the surface and amplified to the point of farcical absurdity. Yet these models do more than simply lift the veil on a concealed language of ideological association, through their construction they begin a re-alignment that posits a new grammar. This is possible as formally the models correspond to a kind of magical fetish; as signifiers they have a similar relation to their signified as a voodoo doll has to the person represented. As our understanding of historical events and artefacts is shaped by subjective connotation, presenting these representations within the framework of an alternative narrative in effect changes the very thing they physically represent.

All this is not to suggest however a retreat to an aesthetic of naïvety, of quaint and childish craft: Instead the total embrace of the claims of these object of contemporary society must permeate every aspect of construction. The model must be stylized to achieve the aestheticisation of historical truth that stands in for validity; the fashion that determines the attractiveness, therefore the truth value, of an object and which is controlled by those with a vested interest in hegemony of historical narrative. For these are the conditions that set up the possibility for a paradox that is able to undermine the system.

Finally it is worth asking why any of this is important. Currently, at the British Museum you can gaze down upon models of temples topped with sacrificial alters as projections of constellations drift past exactly as they would have hundreds of years ago in the valley of Mexico. The savagery of the Aztec world is counterbalanced with their beautifully sophisticated visual language; in the glyphs that surrounded them in almost every element of their lives the Mexica understood the horror as a fundamental part of the structure of their society.

Walking through the museum it would be naïve to think that human sacrifice no longer exists in our society, it is rather that we can no longer interpret the visual language that would allow us to see it.