Culture . 05/15/2008 01:45 AM . Cole Jeffrey

A few weeks ago, I visited IKEA for the first time. I’m a big fan of the movie Fight Club, which frequently pokes fun at IKEA, so I was curious to see what it was like. I went somewhat cynical of the store and dubious of its wares, but by the time I left, like so many others, I had “fallen prey to the IKEA nesting instinct.”

I think it happened when I realized that, for relatively little money, I could build an entire existence from IKEA’s “Scandinavian modern furniture and accessories.” IKEA could allow me to choose what kind of dining set defines me as a person. Do I see myself as an “ANTNÄS” dining table and chairs kind of guy? Does the “EKTORP” sofa properly express who I am, or is it the “TYLÖSAND” sofa? IKEA gives me an infinite number of possibilities for self-expression and self-gratification.

My girlfriend warned me that if I went to IKEA, I wouldn’t be able to leave without buying something. She was right. On the way out, I felt like I had to buy something to be complete. If I walked out of the store empty-handed, I wouldn’t be leaving behind relatively inexpensive, relatively cheaply-made, and relatively cool Danish furnitur — I was leaving behind me, or at least, symbols of me. So, because I couldn’t bear to be separated from all those signifiers, I bought a palm tree for $10.

My visit to IKEA came to mind recently when I went to the Los Angeles Cultural Museum. I’ve always found it odd that the LACMA is located right next to the La Brea Tar Pits. That’s where prehistoric mammals gave themselves a tar bath and tragically died. When you walk from the tar pits to the museum, you’re traversing the entire history of mankind. One day we were spearing mammoths. The next day we were painting.

I was very impressed with LACMA’s collection of modern art. Now, I’ve always thought that modern art should technically be called “modern arrangement” since most of it merely involves the artist “arranging” somebody’s else work into something innovative, imaginative, and unusual. At the LACMA, my theory was verified by displays of basketballs floating in water, statues built out of vacuum cleaners, medicine cabinets containing broken mirrors and skulls with tape over their mouths, and furniture about two-stories high.

The sign above the door of the LACMA told me to look at this “art” on its own terms, and to come away with more questions than answers. I’m not sure what questions I came away with from my visit, but I did realize something about modern art.

When you look at modern art, you’re not looking at a painting. You’re meeting a person.

We live in an introspective culture. We are a generation continually focused on thinking about who we are, who we want to be, what we want, what we need, what we feel, what we think, what we do, and what we believe. It’s the Me-Generation, the Myspace world. In a culture like this, a culture that’s perpetually looking inwards, the chief function of its art will always be self-expression. Modern art is a story artists tell about themselves and their relationship to culture. It’s a love story. Artist meets culture. Artist buys culture a drink. Culture dumps artist. Artist uses culture as subject for his painting.

The art in the LACMA and the furniture in IKEA share a connection. They are both a means for self-expression. You see, in the world we live in today, when you buy something, you’re not just buying an item – you’re buying into an ideology. The other day, I saw a forty-year old guy wearing an American Eagle polo, and I laughed at him. Why? Because the American Eagle ideology is marketed at nineteen year-olds and those who want to be nineteen. So either this guy didn’t know what he was buying, or he was trying to buy into the idea that an American Eagle polo could make him look younger and “more with it.”

Today, there are as many ideologies out there to philosophize about as there are items to purchase – Gap jeans, Calvin Klein suits, Victoria’s Secret underwear, Sony plasma TVs, Nikon cameras, Rolex watches, X-Box games, Apple computers, Lexus automobiles, Starbucks lattes. In and of themselves, these items are just items. But advertising has turned innocuous household items into ideological pillars that prop up our consumerist existence. If people only bought what they needed, modern society would collapse. So, Hollywood and advertisement executives have found a way to get us to buy stuff we don’t need. They attach ideological significance to non-ideological objects, and therefore we must buy them.

We’re not buying things; we’re buying ourselves.

When consumer items attain ideological significance, modern art becomes mechanical and commercialized. This is because modern people use the product to perform the task once reserved for the created. We express our identities through what we buy. This establishes a relationship between modern art and mass production. Mechanical art (photography, cinema, digital), industrial supplies, graffiti, household items, etc. all become not only valid content for art but a valid medium as well. Therefore, in the world of art, a statue can be made out of paper cups. Pop artists like Andy Warhol can exhibit cans of Campbell’s Soup or copies of photographs he didn’t take and it can be considered art. Classic art focused on the created, but modern art deals specifically with the produced.

This is a big problem in modern society. Consumerism and creativity are the same thing. The art and the products share the same goal and perform the same function. We use modern paintings the same way we use our jeans or our cars or our Ipods. We use them to tell the world something about us. We try to buy as much as we can so we can be as whole and complete as possible.

People try to “solve” this problem of mass production and manipulation. They rebel against the “machine” in a variety of ways. Many forms of music, such as country western or punk rock, for example, are based on the desire of subculture groups to be countercultural. Gretchen Wilson sings in “Red-Neck Woman” that she doesn’t need designer underwear to be sexy. “I can buy the same d—- thing on a Wal-Mart shelf half price/And still look sexy, just as sexy, as those models on TV.” On the other end of the music artist spectrum, rock stars like Nirvana tear their jeans and punk bands like Green Day apply liberal amounts of eyeliners, all in protest of conventions and consumerism.

Music is one area of rebellion. Fashion’s another. It illustrates how people react to culture in order to preserve their identity. Once upon a time, jeans and T-shirts were worn only by the lower classes. Denim was the cloth of the working man, and T-shirts were considered to be an undergarment. But then Hollywood icons like James Dean and Marlon Brando started wearing them to protest the way of life modern society offered. However, it wasn’t long before the protest became popular. The Dean look became “cool,” and everybody wanted to be cool. So everybody bought blue jeans. Before long, they were a commercialized item thanks to people like Calvin Klein. So, people had to find a new way to protest. People like Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain started tearing holes in their jeans. But this became a fad, too.

When we buy to express who we are, we get lost in the crowd because the symbols we buy can be produced ad infinitum and bought by anyone. There’s nothing original about our symbols, so there’s nothing original about us. We can try wearing tattered jeans or growing our hair out. However, this attempt to be countercultural is ultimately just an attempt to establish an identity separate from the masses. This is what the masses want though, so the revolution is doomed to become just another fad. The counterculture becomes just another subculture.

The truth is that it doesn’t really matter whether you’re cultural or countercultural, whether you listen to pop music or alternative rock, whether you were Hollister or buy your clothes from Wal-Mart. What you buy doesn’t express who you are. In the world of Tyler Durden, “You’re not your job. You’re not how much money you have in the bank. You’re not the car you drive. You’re not the contents of your wallet. You’re not your f——— khakis.”

Philosophers, psychoanalysts, educators, writers, talk show hosts, actors, and artists have all communicated countless visions of this problem to us, presenting their own view of the problem and offering their own solution to it. If we examine Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto, the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud or Jacques Lacan, the lectures of Slavoj Zizek, the films of David Finch, the punk rock movement, or even the Red Hot Chili Peppers (“Californication”) we find a plethora of opinions and perspectives on the issue.

Obviously, it’s impossible for me to present my own solution here. That would be beyond the scope of this essay and my abilities as a writer. But what I would like to do in closing, however, is to give the problem a name of my own.

Marx called the problem “dialectical materialism.” He believed we could solve the problem by equally distributing wealth among the social classes. If everybody had what they needed to live and nobody was wealthier than anybody else, then envy and greed would be eliminated.

I think, however, that Marx was quite wrong. He misidentified man’s central need. He thought it was the things you can buy with money – food, shelter, clothing, etc. I don’t think man’s central need is money, though. Like money, you can spend it. But unlike money, once it’s gone, you can’t get it back.

It’s time.

We are all caught up in time, consumed by it as it runs itself out. When we begin our lives, the only thing we know for certain is that they will eventually end. We will pass away, and everything we have will pass with us.

That’s why we don’t want brand name items or designer products in and of themselves. We’re not looking for material comfort. We’re looking for something beyond our material needs. We’re looking for something that transcends Marxist theories or yuppie dreams. We’re looking for an inconsumable object, an imperishable item, something that will tell the world who we were and why, when we’re dead and gone, we mattered.

They write about that in philosophy books, talk about it in museums, and search for it in shopping malls.

They don’t sell it at IKEA.

Cole Jeffrey studies English in Southern California. He named his palm tree Ivanka.



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