Lesson one of Modernism: the end is implicit in the means, just don't ask what it is.įaced with a world embraced by structures that have mutated from being means to becoming ends in themselves, Julian Opie makes motorway journeys for pleasure and takes holiday snaps of the baggage reclaim hall at Heathrow airport. Dotted around the outskirts of London - Acton is a good example - or any other large city are hopelessly optimistic 'business parks' almost entirely populated by companies that seem to do nothing but supply services and products to other businesses to help them in their aims of efficiency, greater productivity and becoming Modern. In Britain, especially, 'Business' seems to be something that people do as an end in itself the product or service is irrelevant. Business is exactly the same: commute, have meetings, write reports, commute.
Tourism is a procession of coordinated movements from airport to hotel to place of historical interest and at each point nothing really happens. All these structures purportedly service the vague kinds of activities that neatly supply the answers to questionnaires: Is it a) leisure, b) shopping, c) business or d) tourism? Yet each of these activities has been functionalised and streamlined to the point of meaninglessness. You can travel to Paris from London in 45 minutes, get to work from the suburbs or the country quickly and efficiently by tube or train (if you live anywhere other than Britain) brunch at MacDonalds in the blink of an eye, and by the time you get home you have saved so much time that you just don't know what to do with it all and blow it in front of a television. The systems that have been designed to facilitate movement have taken speed and efficiency as their goal and however much we may pretend, no one can remember what it is that people actually do along the way. But what is ours? Long after the excitement of international travel has worn off, what is left after a century or so of massive investment in roads, railways and airports? We have the technology. In the Tintin scheme of things, even the most uncontrolled events, an exploding house or an erupting volcano, have a restraint and clarity that somehow renders them inescapably tangible: all is perfectly delineated.įor Tintin, the infrastructure of the modern world is a vehicle to adventure, for that, nominally at least, is his raison d'être. Everything in his world is always new, always clean and always visible. These graphic devices transform everything into the representation of an ideal, but an ideal that has been made concrete.
Blocks of flat, uniform colour describe Tintin's world: Unwavering grey lines of constant thickness bound the forms of his own body as much as the objects he encounters. With Tintin, the sense of a place so real it is unreal is overpowering. The second quality that elevates Tintin as the Modernist par-excellence is that the world he moves in is an almost virtual world: it has no texture, no age and no decay. Tintin's acceptance of the world and his neutrality of stance are what mark him as the Modern Man: while his companions struggle with technology, blundering about in an attempt to try and make a world (of which they don't feel entirely in control) perform their bidding, Tintin is at home with the system as it invisibly performs its functions to serve his needs. Reaching the moon in a rocket modelled on the results of German World War II jet research, Tintin takes it all in his stride, as confident as Hergé that space travel is a logical inevitability of technological progress. When Tintin leaves the planet, he does so unhindered by the fact that space travel is yet to come. Everything that Tintin travels in or on is the most advanced technological manifestation of its type: Italian sports car, electric train or swing-winged jet, each is rendered exactingly in precise and loving detail.
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