Once upon a time, leisure was associated with the consumption of goods and services burnt off in a ritual we once called, ‘retail therapy’. I suppose it was later deemed morally reprehensible to consume outside of one’s immediate needs in a societal turn towards an ethical productivism which occurred in a post-2008 epoch governed by that orbital bomb of worldwide debt owed to the Decepticons. And so, in those processes of ethical productivism quite obviously designed to outmatch an economic one, hating on Primark became the intellectual equivalent of shooting fish in a barrel, where a slow news day could be alleviated by telling people just how shit they were for buying cheap dresses.
As a consequence to this, clothing companies long ago emulated the aesthetic outlay of the transitional space when it came to the design and appearance of their high street stores in the bait and switch of ‘retail therapy’ with the whispering casuistry of ‘it’s okay to consume if you’re just passing through.’ Whilst the colourless detachment of H&M seems like the conspicuous instance of this emergent strategy in high street fashion, it is actually a local Primark that emulates the hyper-neutral interiority of the nonplace to an extreme degree by positioning itself as a literal threshold between a dying mall and the cloudier world of the high street outside. In these high street stores the libidinous surplus of the gym meets the soundscapes of minimalista bars in the ecstasy of a permanent happy hour. A place where stylised mannequins replace bodies on tiled floors gleaming with the clinical whiteness of a user interface. Like a casino full of shiny surfaces, (there are hardly any windows) the shop floor holds the same hostility to the natural cycles of night and day; a territory where mirrors fold fluorescent light onto itself in the forever space of this artificial world. It could be said that these nonplaces appear strange only in the darkness of after hour storefronts, where a scrubland of polyester emerges in the twilight sun of a desert plain, coats hanging from rail hooks like lions hiding in long grass.
Brushing up against the abstractivity of this nonplace by night is the practicality of the day in contrast. Imagine these interiors littered with the remnants of pandemic installed procedures made observable in a series of half-empty hand sanitisers and floors of peeling tape – disappearing in real-time – once yellow, and now fading against the pervasiveness of blue fonts; their warm-cold turquoise made to facilitate the naturalisation of blue staff left standing behind transparent partitions. It is this half-appearance of hand sanitisers – the relics of an essential business – the seemingly sterilised, plastic architecture of a post-catastrophe that supplies this entire shopping experience with the semiotic auguries of an airport terminal. And like the alabaster and granite statues that appear throughout our histories, the hollowness of the shop floor mannequin accounts only for the way we were. Bleached bone and sometimes grey-skinned like the aliens that fell to earth at Roswell – they have become sardonic reflections that stand guard like ticket inspectors. Both a parody of fashion’s malnourished body and a surreptitious reflection held towards the lack of meaningful human interaction that occurs in these places, mannequins appear as a congregation of bodies frozen in Medusa’s Garden, dummies watching over us with their retinas reterritorialized into the surveillance cameras’ omnipresence.
Nevertheless, I have seen how voile with a strawberry print can take on the appearance of a waterfall, a shimmering oobleck of clothes on chrome, fabrics hanging with the softness of their scalloped edges. It is remarkable how dresses embrace the slopping arms of those heavy-duty garment racks that run as parallel as the tracks that pass-through train stations. There is in the colour to match the seasons – the pleasant smell of fabric – the pools of shimmering chrome, a profound sense of placelessness to match the placelessness of the entire world. To say, there is behind all of this a deep sense of the weird and the eerie made congenial with hyperreality.
Fisher’s writing on the The Weird and the Eerie is inextricably connected to a modern world haunting the ghosts left in this one, where those phenomena Fisher once recounted as disorientating to reality have since become almost entirely normalised within the culture, even comforting to some in the way they appear ever-present, offering themselves as a stabilising presence on the other side of that symbolic order of things, where ours is today a reality that exists in lieu of all absences. If this reality is imbued with a sense of being both weird and eerie it is only because it is radiating an integral characteristic. Therein, the fact that anything could exist behind the nature of these appearances actually ends up reinforcing the appearance, rather than undermining it – and so, where the spirit of reality is hollowed out, the weird and the eerie inevitably falls into place. Perhaps these phenomena no longer offer themselves as forms of ontological subsidence then but come today as a means of furthering the connective tissue, the distinct modes that predicate the nature of this hyperreality as a condition that feeds off the delirious miscibility of Primarni Shanzhai.
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“Alex Mazey’s playful text art sequence follows Ghost through a hyperreal metropolis beset with neoliberal temptation and eschatological peril. Woven between the visuals are virtuosic lyric poems: poignant, philosophical and irreverent. Mazey gamifies this astute, genre-defying collection with an intricate plexus of symbolism, mysticism, numerology, reference and ritual. Haunting and haunted, Ghost Lives paints an eerily recognisable picture of how it feels to be lonely, or, in other words, to be human.”
The Primark Aesthetic originally appeared at magazine.publicpressure.io as Primarni Shanzhai (2023)
The art that features here was made using StarryAI, prompted by A.M.