boredom is always counter-revolutionary

Considering this is its 100^th anniversary, the 2008 Daily Mail Ideal Home show is a disappointingly modest affair. Whilst other years have seen the construction of whole model communities, contributions by pioneer architects and ever grander installations, including the world’s largest bathtub in 1996, the central piece this year is Century Street. This consists of little more than the façade of three Georgian townhouses, with signs trying to convince the visitor that one frontage represents the Fifties, one the Sixties and one the Eighties. Actually, I’m not even sure that these are the right dates, so unimpressed was I by their tired signifiers of days-gone-by: three cars from different decades and a few mannequins dressed in the supposed fashions of the day. Inside the unit – not even constructed as the interior of those homes – is a small museum display of products representative of each decade of the Twentieth Century. The commercial imaginary of history: modern life as experienced through brands and logos and children’s toys. Star Wars figures from the 1970s, cassette tapes from the 1980s, the Spice Girls from the 1990s. Public life and private memory as product identification: “I remember Fiendish Feet”.

The Dream Home section was, quite frankly, fucking terrible. I don’t think they even tried this year. I think it had some IKEAesque furniture, neon glowing lights and a flatscreen TV, but I couldn’t really pay attention. Just trying to imagine this as a dream home, an ideal life, model living, elicits such beige images of content consumerism that you get bored even with your dreams. This is no future, this is no aspirational model to keep people working hard, reaching forward for a better life. This is shameless reproduction of the norm, a fear of alternatives. Does capitalism not even need to try anymore? The rest of the hall was filled with jumped-up market-hall salesmen selling rubber brooms, onion slicers and massage chairs. More grimacing, gelled and perma-tanned salesmen flogging plastic bits and offering an easier life for the wife. “Ain’t that right ladies?”

The reason why I’m a little worked up about all this – aside from the £6 entrance fee and notable lack of freebies – is that I’ve started to imagine the Ideal Home exhibition as a site of potentially great imaginative power. These events emerge with the Great Exhibition of 1851, just as consumerism and a collection/commodity-based lifestyle are gathering speed: Walter Benjamin says that these events “erected the universe of commodities”. Later on, they serve to sustain consumerism during more austere, post-war reconstructive periods, convincing people to keep on buying, something better will come. The scale changes, from the Victorian spectacularity and phantasmagoric display of a world of products (or, an empire of products), through to the more domesticized mid-C20th, quietly aspirational, middle-everything, house-and-home values.

So whilst home exhibitions may have functioned as harbingers of capitalism - as decidedly hegemonic projections of the official vision for private, domestic life into the mind of the general public - at least in previous years they seem to have tried something a little more, well, fun. This year, I felt like I was attending a tradition that was on its last legs, overtaken and co-opted by IKEA, Habitat and glossy magazines that make the ideal home a permanent fixture in the consumer’s imagination, something intrinsic to regular everyday life. Spectacularism, novelty and imagination have been domesticized to the point of ritual. The future has been colonised by IKEA’s interior design team.

In fact, witnessing the absolute banalization of the Ideal Home exhibition, I drew a parallel with the proposed demolition of Robin Hood Gardens. Both of these institutions have, for at least one moment, represented a reconfiguration of domestic life, an attempt to conceptualise the everyday in a slightly different register. Both tried to offer a more imaginative, speculative image of how the future could look and be lived. Both, similarly, seem to have simply been overtaken by more efficient, more easily recuperated practices and institutions. So whilst the aesthetic of the Ideal Homes exhibition has been co-opted into regular promotional aesthetics, particularly via IKEA, the brutalist aesthetic has become simply a historical moment that, it would seem, is to be preserved as a relic or forgotten. These utopian moments are being trampled beneath a runaway rationality that sees and sells one - and only one - official future.

After leaving the exhibition, on the train home I was to have an encounter that served to demonstrate the effect of this conceptual limitation, this restriction of imaginative possibility regarding the future. A young man - mini bottle of wine in hand, tie-loosened and salmon pink shirt untucked - staggered up to my girlfriend and I and, seemingly drawn to my utterly outrageous combination of a pierced nose and “conservative clothes”, started to berate me to, essentially, “give it up - get serious - get a proper job and start preparing to provide for a family”. The crux of his argument was, without knowing a thing about me, that I wouldn’t get a good office job looking like I do, so sort it out. He knew, of course, because he had already been through it before, but the system breaks you down (he actually said that). He couldn’t imagine any lifestyle other than his own, with an office job, a family and a financially secure future and, it would seem, a repression of leisure time so acute that within a couple of hours of finishing work on a Friday evening he is drunk and berating people who, for whatever reason, are avoiding the same self-flagellation.