Take the tour, read the books, and find new ways of seeing. Motorway sightseeing shows the modern pull of mundanityWhy would someone pay to spend several hours on a coach on the M25? To admire the design of concrete bridges? To find collective solace in the loneliness of motorway service stations? As a new form of trainspotting? Or maybe because it's now, well, fashionable? It has been building for years. Books in which philosophers ponder airport concourses. Meditations on British roads. Psychogeographers trudging round the orbital network. Television documentaries on the history of the motorway. Glossy service station scrapbooks. The news that a coach tour operator has sold out a complete tour of the famously entropic ring around London just shows how mainstream all this has become.A possible ur-text for the contemporary obsession with modern mundanity is photographer Martin Parr's book Boring Postcards, published in the late 1990s. The point with the boring postcards is that they were not, in the context of the turn of the 21st century, boring. Rather they were bizarre, dreamlike, improbable images of things that we once must have treasured, that somehow became jokes and non-sequiturs.Parr's collection amassed practically every component of the Newly Interesting Boring. 1960s concrete infrastructure, such as the sublime sweep of Preston bus station; public art on postwar marketplaces in Stockport; nuclear power stations; airport departure lounges; suburban developments, holiday camps, modernist housing estates; and, of course, the motorway, from its futurist service stations to the long strips of clear concrete ploughed between green verges.For the past few years, the internet has abounded with material like this. Print publications range from David Lawrence's startlingly rich and comprehensive Food on the Move, a history of the motorway service station, to Anne Ward's travel guide to improbable Scottish holiday destinations Nothing to See Here.What Parr did was a simple act of defamiliarisation. If these were just contemporary photographs, we would be nearer to the linked, but in many ways dissimilar Crap Towns or Is Britain Great? books with their imagery of miserable Blighty. These, though, were postcards ? sent off by travellers, holidaymakers or the inhabitants of new estates with what must have been some pride, some sense that these "boring" places had real value, that they were worth looking at.During the Blair boom, with its bright, restless, neoliberal effacement of the clunky, provincial modernism of postwar social democracy, this started to mean something quite different. The implication was that once, these mundane things were considered rather special, by their designers, owners and users. Maybe they could be again? Parr may not have intended the postcards to mean anything of the sort, and it could just have been an elaborate joke on his part. Others, though, were deadly serious about this archaeology of the mundane.It's perhaps a way of reasserting something lost. In modern art and design from the 1910s to the 1930s, transport, production and urbanism were celebrated as a new technologised world; when Kraftwerk evoked the same in the 1970s, the assumption was that they were joking too. Instead, it's likely they were trying to recover a lost innocence ? a simple joy at the capabilities of man and machine. The approach they took to this also borrowed from the interwar avant-garde. As Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky put it, "the purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known". The technique of art is to make objects "unfamiliar", to create a "deautomatised perception" in which you suddenly see something you see every day in a completely new and revelatory way.This can be a very enjoyable game, and most of the books and projects mentioned above show generous, funny and warm ways of looking at what is all too easily dismissed as drab and nondescript. You could even create a radicalised definition of it, to encompass the seemingly "boring" work on containerisation and ports by photographer Allan Sekula, where seeing is radicalised by revealing the facts of production, distribution and exploitation behind the mundane everyday artefact. Yet it could just as easily be a wan, dilettantish and apolitical way of looking at the world of things ? staring at the sheer misery of a traffic jam and whispering "the world is beautiful".? Follow Comment is free on Twitter @commentisfreeLondonOwen Hatherleyguardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
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