Out in the cold...

There aren't that many things I can pride myself on being great at. I'm one of those people who're anywhere from average to very good on a lot of things. But one of the things I definitely have a talent for is starting out in one place on the Internet and ending up somewhere completely different.
So, when I was poking around the website of major, Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter and stumbled across an article about the construction of this season's ice hotel in Jukkasjärvi it was really unevitable that I'd end up reading more about it. Ever since I first heard about that hotel a few years ago I've always found it intriguing on many levels. So, there I was, looking at all the different designs of this season's ice hotel when one room in particular made me halt, re-read the name of the room, tilt my head slightly as I made sure I wasn't imagining it, and finally giggling as I realised what the two designers had done with the room dubbed "Getting Cold Feet".
Reading about the designers I immediately became curious of the "masked" one known as INSA. Because artists who hide their identities tend to be graffiti artists and that's one of those areas of art that absolutely fascinates me but I know very little about (there are plenty of those areas, by the way, far more than someone who's studied art history and contemporary art for as long as I have should be allowed). So, I started looking for information on this guy (unless it's a woman who's taken a lot of trouble to cleverly hide her gender, in which case I apologise and say that I'm impressed) and there doesn't seem to be a wikipedia-page about him, go figure. I did find some articles though, and through them a link to the "official" (I so hate that word sometimes, but I suppose it's needed to sort out these little pages we call web) site.
Now. Someone who just gave INSA's work a quick glance might say it's just the work of some semi-perv wanting to gawk over half-naked women, but that's not it (or maybe that's some of it, but that's none of our business, really, and it's not of importance), there's much more to it than that. The use of the high-heeled shoe (sometimes with an accompaning leg and arse), which is a common representative of fetishes, is quite thought-provoking. In itself it's just a shoe. Depending on your disposition and feelings towards footwear that can make you think about fashion, footwear you might crave but can't really afford, Carrie Bradshaw half-running down a New York street, pin-up models, pornography or maybe how your wife spends far too much on shopping. But there is something these things have in common - consumerism. If you'd seen a sensible shoe for walking you might just think of necessities, but the high-heeled shoe is not a necessity, is it? Nope, it represents both the aforementioned consumerism and something much more primal - desire. For women (yes, I'm generalising) it's the desire to have it. For men (still doing it) the desire have the woman wearing it.
I've spent hours reading and looking at things by or concerning INSA. But those little cog-thingies inside my brain have been spinning around, making all that machinery work at high-speed too. Because this did something that various things do to me every now and then; I started thinking about consumerism in modern society. It sounds really pretentious, I know, but things just set that stuff off in my head every now and then, but always from a slightly different angle. And this one was quite different and more intense (just goes to show what art and culture can do to me), because this time around I was forced to come back to myself, and scrutinising your own behaviour can be both fun and horrible, but it's always at least slightly frightening. While I occasionally will be watching something trashy on TV with my mum (like Dr. Phil or something) and we'll both exclaim how we don't understand those shopoholics who keep turning up with their "addiction" and how we could never do that. That's not necessarily true. While I get bored very quickly if I shop for clothes (and I even did during that lovely year I felt somewhat thin) if I had the money to spend on my fetish, I'd spend it. And you know what that means, right? Yup. Boxes upon boxes of mint condition original 70s vinyl.

My head was still racing with ideas about consumerism in media and mainstream culture (and subculture too!) and how this could easily turn into one of the two 10-week papers I have to write to ever get that stupid degree of mine when I accompanied my brother as he took the dog for a morning walk. Once outside, my mind started drifting back to the art aspects of INSA (possibly triggered by the dog doing his own street art by spraying the innocently white snow with an in-your-face kind of yellow) and then to the ice hotel (which is looking stunning this season, you must go to their website and check out the pictures of all the rooms). And as I walked there, being viciously stung by the tiny snow flakes which were whipped around in the wind, I started thinking about how much I'll miss this when I move to the UK. I'll complain about it like everyone else, but it's no secret that I love snow and winter. Hell, I was born during a blizzard and a temperature of -25 (rarely experienced this far south, even back then). And I don't even mind when it springs itself on us like this, killing all the flowers which had begun to stick their defiant heads out of the ground. In fact, I was quite enjoying the feeling of an early morning being filled with daylight and snow and birds singing (though, I swear they were louder than normal, as if shouting complaints about the damn weather to one another).
You can't really put a price on the art of snow and ice, can you? While I love leaving the first set of footprints on virgin snow, I know they'll have filled up or melted away a couple of hours later. Or been trampled beyond recognition by other feet whose intentions were much less poetic than my feet's were as I went for that 3 am walk with no other purpose. And while INSA can sell his own range of stilettos, inspired by the artwork he's made for years, for £200 a pair; come spring, his ice suite will return to Torne river and it won't turn up on a 22nd Century edition of the Antiques Roadshow.