It was my birthday last week, and being these days a quiet rural dweller with a sweet pea obsession rather than the inner-city Dorothy Parker wannabe of yesteryear, I welcomed my appropriately gentle gifts: flowers, plants, an original exhibition catalogue from decades ago, some scent promising to recreate beach walks. I counted among my blessings a recent eye test that showed no further deterioration, an unbroken Duolingo streak (Irish), a roof repair that seems to be holding – what we might call the joy of things not getting worse, small triumphs that often feel disproportionately large and lucky.
On the same day, Apple CEO Tim Cook appeared to suggest that I have little need for all the funny little old-world analogue stuff that I hold dear. In an advertisement for the new iPad Pro – the chief attribute of which, according to same, is that it is extremely thin, indeed the thinnest it has ever been – viewers were treated to a hellish sight: a platform crammed with musical instruments, cameras, games, paints, a record player, an artist’s mannikin, all reduced to splinters and dust beneath a giant industrial crusher. Get rid of all that crap, it seemed to say, for here is a gadget that renders the whole lot obsolete.
Also on the same day, I found myself talking to someone on a podcast about the artist Eileen Agar, whose most splashily memorable work is a wild, witty, marine-themed headpiece entitled Ceremonial Hat for Eating Bouillabaisse. That someone might come up with such an idea – so silly, so funny, so strangely surreal and suggestive – and then follow it through by actually gathering all the necessary bits of shoreline detritus and transforming them into a three-dimensional object is a small miracle of imaginative persistence: the world doesn’t need a bouillabaisse hat, and nor do you, but someone made one anyway, and there it is, a beautiful artefact.
I am aware of the irony: to get a better idea of Agar’s artwork, I Googled it, staring at multiple images and following links to various sources to read more about its creation. I interviewed someone about it via Zoom, our conversation captured and refined via editing tools, available to access through several platforms including Apple. The tech helped me to discover more about a piece of art from a cultural moment and tradition that we can reasonably think would have repudiated it.
Apple’s great big crusher has infuriated many, who take from it a message of destruction, a blithe and definitive flattening: not merely of the objects themselves – the piano, the pot of paint, the reflective camera lens – but of the creators who use them to express themselves and their ideas. Their anger and disappointment is, of course, part of a context, in which the creative arts and its practitioners are starved of funding, threatened by relentless copying and piracy, bereft of political support, unremunerated and unacknowledged.
Channelling Pollyanna, I don’t think it’s quite as bad as all that. In celebration of springtime and another year on the clock, I took a trip from my home in the south-east corner of Ireland out to the west this week, best pal in tow – a road trip fuelled by apples and Taytos crisps rather than Hunter S Thompson psychedelics or the liberation feminism of Thelma & Louise, but pretty unrestrained by our own lights. Every evening, stuffed with seafood, we’d stagger into a pub and happen on a group of musicians enjoying a session, and although the hat was often passed around for the tourists’ coins, the performances felt far too celebratory to be merely a commercial transaction.
One night, following the sound, we walked through what appeared to be a deserted hotel, all residents neatly tucked up in bed, to pass through a door into a back bar roiling with noise and applause. On another, we sat in a tiny pub, listened to a soloist give a shiveringly beautiful rendition of On Raglan Road and felt the mysterious beauty of Patrick Kavanagh’s “enchanted way”.
Is this impossibly romantic? Of course. Taking a boat to Inishbofin and wandering the coastline, we marvelled at the way the islanders decorate their gardens with found objects, yarn bombs and intricate bug hotels – but it was a fine day, and would perhaps not have seemed so delightful had, as is not infrequent in this part of the world, the rain been horizontal and the wind keen enough to take your ears off. Nonetheless, in the warmth of the community centre, an arts festival was running over the weekend, including a talk from documentary photographer Billy Mundow, a chronicler of Irish life, a resident of the island and a vocal opponent of smartphone cameras.
I suppose this is a way of saying that the urge to create may thrive in nooks and crannies as well as in the biggest halls and on the loudest stages, and that it is not dependent on the thinness of your iPad Pro. This is hardly news, but it’s the brashness of the Apple ad’s vision that is perhaps its most shocking aspect. Smashing up musical instruments and art supplies portrayed not as an act of vandalism but as the door to minimalist, tech-enhanced freedom, in which making something requires not understanding and gradual mastery but the savviness to manipulate images and sounds with speed and ease.
It may also be a way of saying this is what getting old looks like. Back at home, with the aforementioned roof repairs still under way – no operating system yet up to the task of stopping a leak – there’s a certain amount of domestic upheaval. We are surrounded by the fruits of our commitment to the analogue: teetering piles of books, stacks of newspapers and magazines, vinyl rarities that are transplanted with kid gloves into storage boxes. It would have been simpler, I guess, had our enthusiasms been more easily contained by the M4 chip that powers the latest tablet, but then where would we be? Sitting beneath the damp rafters, tapping at our screens in an empty room, that’s where.
• Alex Clark is an Observer columnist
