A couple of evenings ago I was sitting on the A train
reading battered and damp printout of Reyner Banham’s 1965 article The Great
Gizmo, published in Industrial Design,
my ink underlines were going fuzzy at the edges, when I was distracted from my
study by a moving image. A young man with a peach-fuzz face was showing off his
new Blackberry to his girlfriend. His device wasn’t exactly revolutionary; it
shoots and display video. Eventually they would take turns filming themselves
kissing, pressing their faces close as if the subway was one big photo booth.
But the item on screen that caught my eye was a horse.
A light tan stallion stood framed on his handheld. The
camera panned, but the horse didn’t move. It zoomed in on a magnificent flank,
but the animal remained still. It’s a photograph, I thought, a page from an equestrian
catalogue or magazine or book. The staged image was beautiful, powerful,
animal. Its coat, translated into emitted light, gleamed like nothing before
it. How strange. A horse on the subway.
Early in his essay Banham’s gizmatic thinking moves from
localized devices: transistor radios, cordless shavers, and walkie talkies, to
the infrastructureless American expansion: outboard motors, Sears Roebucks catalogs, and balloon framing.
The quintessential gadgetry of the
pioneering frontiersman had to be carried across trackless country, set down in
a wild place, and left to transform that hostile environment without skilled
attention. Its function was to bring instant order or human comfort into a
situation which had previously an undifferentiated mess, and for this reason it
is so deeply involved with the American mythology of the wilderness that its
philosophy will bear looking into, both for its American consequences and for
the consequences of its introduction into other landscapes, other scenes.
And so, a horse punctuated my reading of Banham’s excursion
into the western wilds. Not a drab mare, the uncelebrated laborer of nineteenth
century cities, but a robust creature of the cowboy genre. Its inappropriate
presence somewhere below Eighth Avenue reminded me of how far removed we are as
a country from the country. Our contemporary gizmos are symbols of urbanity,
endlessly tied to a networked infrastructure and laced with cosmopolitan appeal.
I say this not to drop into a Green Acres pop-nostalgia for haylofts and hillbillies, but at a
time when urban farming has steadily moved from the arenas of speculative,
eco-centric blogging to mainstream creative class lifestyle. Banham writes, “Rural
happiness in US was never to be the privilege of the few, but was to be the
common property of every member of the family, thanks to domestic
mechanization.” Today, domestic agriculturalization takes command.
If the bubble burst of 2001 issued in a decade of nesty
crafting—the indie bloom of the domestic arts such as knitting, sewing, and
needlepoint and its own detournement, then our current recession comes with a
green thumb, American Gothic style—victory gardens, edible lawns, and
sharecropping rooftops. Never in recent history have so many people looked into
their CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) boxes and wondered what to do with
kale. Trendsetting locavores are raising bees (almost legal in New York City
after years of contention)
and chickens—the later giving rise to a host of Banham-esque gadgetry.
The subgenre of poultry prefab offers up huts, Eglus,
and coops all designed to blend the more palatable aspects of
agriculture—crowing cocks and cuddly chicks—into daily urban and suburban life.
Chicken coops fulfill Banham’s gizmo checklist:
“…A small self-contained unit of high performance in
relation to its size and cost, whose function is to transform some
undifferentiated set of circumstances to a condition nearer human desires. The
minimum of skill is required in its installation and use, and it is independent
of any physical or social infrastructure beyond that by which it may be ordered
from a catalogue and delivered to its prospective user.”
But ultimately they remain closer to hairdryers, devices
linked to personalization, than to a pastoral enterprise. Across the country
aficionados (such as Susan Orlean)
cluck approvingly about their poultry routines: the scattering of feed and
importantly, the gathering of eggs. The perfect egg, humane and free of
hormones, the yolk a golden symbol of the good life.
It’s not surprising that legs and breasts are left out of
the equation. These birds are productive pets. Their necks are safe. Credit is
to be given to Chef Daniel Barber whose working farm is the site of the high
end restaurant Blue Hill at Stone Barns. Diners who arrive early can tour the
slaughterhouse. “It’s about life and death and disease, and that’s part of what
it means to live in an agricultural community,” he said in a 2008 interview
published in the Times. “We’re not Disneyland.”
Over at
Strange Harvest, Sam Jacob uses Banham’s essay to frame
the vast desert landscape of Chuck Jones’ Wile E Coyote and Roadrunner
cartoons—there gadgetry promises the Frontierland wish that the West is a place
where anything can happen, but fails again and again.
Jacob writes:
“Each episode sees the Coyote attempt to catch the
Roadrunner, aided by the products he orders from the ACME Corporation, that
make-anything, deliver-anywhere parody of consumerisms seemingly limitless
offer. Amazing products arrive crated up almost instantaneously. Things like
the Do-It Yourself Tornado Kit, Dehydrated Boulders, Earthquake Pills, Jet
Propelled Pogo Stick, Triple Strength Fortified Leg Muscle Vitamins, and the
amazingly named Acme Future Push Button Home Of Tomorrow Household Appliance
Co. ACMEs products parodied post war trends towards mechanization, convenience
and consumerism.
… Banham argued that Sears Roebuck delivered a kind of
gadgetecture, an out-of-the-box instant urbanism and for this this reason,
gadgetry was "deeply involved with the American mythology of the
wilderness.”’
For Banham, the gizmo bridges the space, cognitive and
otherwise, between here and there. Between backyard comforts and rural expanses
which come with uncomfortable surprises, such as where our food comes from.
It’s no wonder people get queasy. Industrialized meat production is a desert
wasteland of its own invention—artificial and mechanized. A corn-fed crisis
well documented by Michael Pollan. His visualization of Big Agro put a run on
grass-fed beef. And chefs’ and foodies’ taste for the stuff has spatial
consequences. New York City’s demand drives small farmers in upstate New York
to raise happy cows, but where to slaughter them? There’s a shortage of
abattoirs.
“Farms and big business can afford to ship their animals to
mega USDA slaughterhouses but the small farmer can not. USDA approved
slaughterhouses are a rare thing in upstate New York and we need more of them,”
laments Ulla, a farmer’s daughter who blogs about Spring Lake Farm, a purveyor
of grass-fed beef and lamb.
The solution is a gizmo: the mobile slaughterhouse.
The Italian company produces Sint Technology sells the The
Meat Processing Unit (MPU). The MPU fits a plug-and-play production line, complete with
electric stunner and blood and viscera collection points in a portable
container. Cows come in one side, beef comes out the other. The MPU also comes
with philosophy, the Sint website reads:
“In America, it is tradition that a good home cooked meal on
the farm is the best meal you can get. The MPU allows a modern way to bring
back that feeling of local pride that many have lost for generations.”
The MPU’s domestic impulse to create a narrative about the
American home recalls one of from Banham’s essay, the Clark Cortez camper, a
“self-propelled residential gizmo” he calls the queen of the American road,
writing “The Clark’s running gear is a hot-rodder of proprietary catalogue
components, and once tanked up and its larder stocked it is independent of all
infrastructures for considerable periods of time.”
While Banham’s tendency is to use gadgets to urbanize the
rural, the MPU offers the potential to truly bring agrarian life to the
city—the logical extension of urban farming and a return to an earlier version
of the city when New York had streets named Abattoir Place (West 39th Street
between Eleventh and Twelfth Avenues) and Slaughter House Lane (an L-shaped
street connecting William and Pearl Streets).
Still, meat in the city, like bees and chickens, comes with
contention. The Times reported that while spots in Queens have the highest
concentration of live animal markets in the country, ones that meet kosher and
halal standards as well as ones that provide flanks to Blue Hill, there's bone
picking going on.
“Perhaps inevitably, when it comes to killing animals for
food, immigrant Queens clashes with suburban-homeowning Queens: Some of the
people who worry about factory-produced meat are unenthusiastic about having
mom-and-pop abattoirs next door.”
Yet, for the tattooed and bearded butchers-to-be (brocavores)
looking to kill and cure their own meat,
a mobile abattoir is a gift worthy of the both Sharper Image catalog and Sears Roebuck.
#lgnlgn