We are a post-modern culture obsessed with soaking up the goodthings in life even though we long to rediscover the 'real thing'. But the marriage of materialism and purity can create some pretty odd bedfellows, suggests Kathryn Holmquist.
The advertising slogan for bottled H20 epitomises the place we're at in 2002. After the style orgy of the 1990s - the decade that recycled the minimalism of the 1950s, the flower power of the 1960s, the disco tastelessness of the 1970s and the Thatcherite Laddism of the 1980s (which it renamed "Attitude", defined when one of the Gallagher brothers mimed the insertion of his Brit Award into his backside) - we're all due a cultural detox.
Fast on water long enough, and somebody somewhere might come up with an original idea. Authenticity is the new aspiration in an era when the highest praise actress Samantha Morton can give her Irish colleague, actor Colin Farrell, is that he is "real".
And she hopes he'll stay real.
But wait. Doesn't that sound familiar? Wasn't "the real thing" a slogan to sell a soft drink in the 1970s? Oh dear.
Water you wear. Leaving aside the point that the truly "authentic" might order tap-water to wash down the frothy coffee, water symbolises purity (as in Ballygowan's TV ads) and it represents nature in a tub (as in TV ads for Kerry Maid). Purity and nature are two things in short supply for those stuck in traffic as they commute to their overpriced three-bed semi-ds in Dublin's outer suburbs, which the 1990s turned into a no-man's land that increasingly feels like Los Angeles with its "nineteen suburbs in search of a metropolis", to quote US writer H. L. Mencken. So, if you can't experience purity and nature, buy it in a bottle.
Is that where we're headed in the first decade of the 21st century? The 1990s has left confused commuting consumers with not just designer water, but designer coffees, the Internet, text messaging, traffic jams, unaffordable housing and - above all - unprecedented mental traffic. Our minds are clogged by worried tangles of media trends, music styles and cultural signifiers that seem to change from week to week, morphing too fast to assimilate as they speed through cyberspace. "Cultivated leisure is the aim of man", Oscar Wilde believed, but leisure pursuits are being cultivated so fast that we've become cultural butterflies, with no leisure time to enjoy what we see.
Dorian Gray's aspiration, "To cure the soul by the means of the senses . . . and the sense by means of the soul", has been bastardised into the rationale behind every health farm, breakfast cereal, beauty product, car and shampoo advertisement you see, the rationale being that if the product doesn't soothe your nervous disposition it will at least give you an orgasm.
Yet we distrust this materialism as much as it attracts us. The Irish magazine, d'Side, was the style bible for those wishing to stay on the fast-track of the senses, but even that has closed. We're all styled out. How much recycled taste can anyone take? Sampling and re-mixing of past musical fashions (this summer we're listening to reinventions of Supertramp's The Logical Song, with its lyric "when I was young it seemed that life was so wonderful, a miracle, oh it was beautiful, magical", and to a remix of Elvis Presley's A Little Less Conversation) have become the closest things we have to innovation. These pop singles capture the zeitgeist: if only something miraculous and magical would arise, if only we could have less conversation and more living. If only we could be enraptured by invention, rather than reinvention.
Yet we're trapped in a recycling mentality. As critic Andrew Renton declared, "culture is wound on an ever-tightening coil". We're recycling the past so fast that the next new thing is already last year's new thing and there's hardly anything left to recycle anymore. Boyzone, Take That, B*Witched, pop clones - where are ya now?
"What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done; there is nothing new under the sun" (Ecclesiastes 1:8-9), an insight recycled by Shakespeare in Sonnet 59 and by numerous thinkers afterwards. Aldous Huxley knew that our Brave New World was merely an incessant regurgitation of the past: "The charm of history and its enigmatic lesson consist in the fact that, from age to age, nothing changes and yet everything is completely different." Assimilating all this false newness that may or may not be "different" is made even more disorienting by the fact that reality itself has become a media concoction with ever-shifting points of reference.
Throughout the 1990s, reality TV celebrated the dysfunctional. So is dysfunction normal? Maybe it was Bill Clinton who summed up the 1990s best when he said, "It depends on what your definition of 'is' is". No wonder, as New Age purifying magic goes mainstream, your local DIY store is offering your addled mind a cut-price basket of soaps called "Soul-Soothers".
Novelist, journalist and cultural critic Michael Bracewell, is the latest interpreter of Ecclesiastes in his new book, The Nineties: When Surface Was Depth (Flamingo, €12.99 in the UK). "The latter half of the 1980s had seen the beginnings of destabilising cultural status and blurring aesthetic boundaries," he writes. "Terms such as 'accelerated', 'fragmented' and 'dystopic' were in currency, conveying the sense of a new, volatile, high-speed culture - the future was beginning with the ruination of history.
"From the Alessi kettle to your average maroon and turquoise balustraded business park office building, the Three Ps of post-modernism were making their presence felt: punning, plagiarism and parody."
And so, in the 1990s, you laughed at Reeves and Mortimer's absurdist Goon Show comedy, you saw a revival of Irish stand-up comedy in tandem with the UK trend, you bought into Girl Power and you shopped in a Grafton Street that was MDF-ed into an imitation of a British high street. And now, sick of recycling, you long for authenticity. And so you see the Irish Permanent TSB wooing you with the soft 1960s' Irish flower-child Brian Kennedy, telling you to Get On with Your Short Life. His advice sums up confused Irish aspirations as the 1990s wane and a "new" century sees the light. In 2002, you want basic values, you're aware of your mortality so you want to enjoy living in the moment. You want life to be simple.
The values sold in the ad ("make the most of your short life") mask the contradictory message of the hard sell ("sign your life away to a mortgage company"). No wonder we don't know what "is" is anymore.
Irish popular culture is a three-headed beast that recycles British and US influences while attempting to create its own Irish/European version. So what has the 1990s left us with? Who are we? This is what Vodafone asks us every day in its attempt to make the Irish accept a British mobile phone name-brand with its slogan, "How are you?" Even more confused than the British and the Americans, obviously.
All post-modern societies are amalgams of reconstituted memories - even Ireland, as shown by the success of Enya and Riverdance abroad. Yet we Irish don't identify with Enya and Riverdance, which defined 1990s Ireland outside this island. At home, our artists in some ways seem way ahead of the pack, already on message with the answers for the questions Bracewell asks. John Rocha has sussed that the advertising message in the 21st century, concerning design, is "to make people happy". Happiness - an immaterial feeling - comes from buying crystal, jewellery and minimalist designed interiors. The notion of Authenticity, which Bracewell predicts will be the noughts' antidote to 1990s recycling, has been exemplified by Bono. With his Drop the Debt campaign, Bono is trying to sell on a global scale the idea that we are all one humanity who should share the wealth, as well as the idea that a man who sold art for capitalist gain can gain the moral high ground.
DOROTHY Cross has, for more than a decade, presciently embraced the recycling idea as a New Age concept, bringing together the commercial and the spiritual. Her human teats made from the skin of cows recycle elemental, maternal nature. She takes the image of the human female breast - stolen by advertising and pornography - and returns it to its roots in nature.
Cross's ghost ship, which enlivened Dublin Bay, recycled a dead navy lightship and made it a New Age ghost, embracing all that was magical and mystical. In doing so, she captured both the recycling message, and the aspiration for mystical, surprising sensation. Equally visionary is Martin Boroson's Arts Council-backed Temenos Project, which seeks altered states of awareness through painting, Japanese Noh theatre and a synthesis of world musics. John O'Donoghue's Anam Cara was a best-seller in a US hungry for soul and meaning.
This idea that we're moving beyond the purchase of soul through products, to the discovery of soul through artistic, mystical and meditative acts, is Bracewell's "big concept" (to use the Hollywood term).
Ireland's New Age boom in alternative medicine, spiritual healing and so on seems ahead of the trend. But above all, the Irish factor that seems to challenge most the theory that in the 1990s "surface was depth" is that we spent the decade digging beyond surface to uncover scandals in the Catholic Church, the health system (through the Hepatitis C tribunal) and finance (via the newly published Ansbacher report).
How deeply we go beneath the surface of these revelations to create fundamental change, will show us, in the next decade, how "deep" we actually are.
The idea that surface is depth isn't new. The desire to throw away the values of the past in an attempt to purify the present throbs through Michel Houellebecq's novel, Atomised (Vintage, €6.99 in the UK), a 21st-century vision which diagnoses the problem of human unhappiness not as materialism, but as sexual power play. Evil can be overcome, Houellebecq suggests, by cloning human beings to be without relationships or ties, but with sexually responsive cells on every surface of their bodies so that they spend their lives giving and receiving pleasure.
This is return to the womb fantasy, an advertiser's dream where there is no pain and only gratification. Bracewell, too, sees sexual power play as a kind of entrapping materialism, but seems optimistic that somewhere in our culture there is a hunger for soul that may yet overcome our materialism in favour of a spiritual, parapsychological, multi-dimensional breakthrough.
Maybe it can happen, but maybe it's just an unrealistic desire for womb-comfort - or merely just for something new under the sun.