New Europeans

A Test Site For Everyday Life

Value for Money Mar04 2016, Amsterdam

Cube Chairs and Punk

In a previous article for this site I listed the basic rules to follow in order to start building some simple wooden furniture. Looking at these rules, it occurred to me that there are a fair few parallels with the DIY ethic of punk, especially as it affected the development of electronic music.

There was a moment in the late seventies when synthesisers went from being the preserve of the wealthiest and most established progressive rock bands to something that anyone could build and play and something that was just within a regular person’s price range. This happened at about the time that punk was getting big. It was a perfect alignment. After all, affordable synthesisers were not all that was needed to make the great leap in electronic music that they enabled in the following years. This great leap also required an attitude.

The first few punk musicians who used synthesisers took a bold step into the unknown. They took it because they had borne witness to punk’s challenge to a whole load of other received wisdom. As Peter Hook, bassist of Joy Division and New Order explains in a documentary on Manchester’s Factory Records: “You looked at the Sex Pistols and you thought you could do it, whereas when you looked at Deep Purple or Led Zeppelin you didn’t think you could do it.” Put more simply by his bandmate Bernard Sumner “Three chords, crap singer, there you go, you’ve got a band.” What punk did was fill people with the confidence to act.

Building furniture is something I’d never done before. It was immensely pleasing to be able to do it. And after making a few of these stools I realised that anyone could do it, given half the chance. The caveat here is important… given half the chance. Given half the chance a lot of people would produce a lot of things themselves, and do a lot of things. Given half the chance people would probably grow their own food, collectively, in the community. They would organise activities locally, and produce many of the things that are currently sourced from all over the world.

What limits people’s opportunities to produce their own things? As with synthesisers and early electronic music, the barrier is not simply one of available resources. It’s also lack of confidence in one’s abilities to engage in new things. Building is seen as something difficult, it’s not something anyone can do. It’s for architects and developers and engineers and people trained in the trades.

There is of course a place for training and expertise. But just as with progressive rock music the way our society views the process of shaping our environment is entirely fashioned to put most people off doing it themselves. This invests far too much power in the hands of people who probably never touch the places and things that they make.

The impulse to do is a cornerstone of punk’s DIY ethic. But it is also an impulse that could change the world if it was properly nurtured. Because right now we’re not simply deterred from making things. We’re also discouraged from being active in the whole process of producing and reproducing society. We’re made to feel like economics is too complicated to understand. We’re made to feel like politics is a dry managerial business, only for the properly educated. And we’re made to feel like there is no alternative.

It seems like a lot to take from the modest construction of a pretty average, yet to be fully tested, cube-shaped stool. But what can I say? I had a lot of time to think as I was cutting those 41cm long planks.