I remember IKEA was a dream palace. One year they even had a Christmas special, mulled wine and cake to encourage the buying. They called it glug. I recall cheap bookshelves, lacquered tables, a high chair, most of all the little stuff, glasses, storage drawers, desk lamps and so on. There was the roomful of blue and red of balls for bored kids. For me at least, the thrill is gone. I can’t remember, very clearly. what it was about, that manic accumulation of shiny things to make life easier.

Our place never looked like the pictures in their thick glossy catalogues. We bought things to fit the spaces that our lives opened up in the house as we changed. Everything was part of a plan. We thought it was our plan but, bit by bit, I noticed the pleasant ironies of consumption turn to a ritual with the catalogue as hymn book. I was becoming a believer. Need, greed and credit cards were just round the corner.

Remember how that felt, filling the gap between now and then by assembling a new wall cabinet. What a relief ! No more doubts, no more hanging around waiting for the SBS news. It was easier than art and looked fantastic. These days, feeble as I am, I ‘ve cut out the credit card and the specially provided spanner that comes with every pack. I rely on catalogues alone for my fix. Faith and glossy colour pix conquer all.

This is where Christine Poller’s intriguingly nostalgic exhibit, And On Saturday We Went To Ikea, at The Garage, 45 Grafton Street Bayswater takes over. She restored an eight room dolls house four up, four down with new exciting interior colour schemes. Then she culled a megastore full of images of furniture and various daily delights from catalogues, junk mail, the life style pages and other wet dream consumer reviews. She mounted them on cardboard as stand alone icons, a few dozen in each overcrowded room.

Richard Hamilton used a similar, but random, process for his 1950’s 2 dimensional collage, What is that makes today’s homes so different so exciting? Way back then, there was something to get excited about. A television set was thing of beauty and a joy a forever. What’s more it could show you something interesting, Kennedy Assassinated, Man on the Moon.

Poller’s cutouts have none of Hamilton’s range. They are all about one thing, that carefully contrived, anaesthetic, texture of daily life that masquerades as life style, the pornography of corporate consumption, in which the dining table is always correctly lit and the dog never leaves hairs on the sofa. They fill each space to bursting, an orgiastic riot of choice and excess mimics the mental state of each and every consumer. Their stage set flatness is less a matter of convenience, ease of manufacture, than a reminder of the one dimensionality that exchange value brings to consumption and its consequences.

The television sets in the dolls’ house all show images of the twin towers catastrophe. Somehow it fits with the transient ethos of the color catalogue. If this was a slaughter of the innocents, it was surely only in the sense that innocence can be equated with a lack of depth, with a lack of any awareness that betterment by buying and selling does not lie at the centre of all human life.

In his much quoted, but little studied, book. The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard used the figure of the house as a guide to the ways memory, intellect and desire shape our lives, through the active constituents in things around us and the way we arrange them. The lived in house was a map of the psyche in brick, stone, plaster, wood and metal. Paintings by Magritte and others remind us that the house was always a sponge that soaked up dreams. Bachelard observes at one point that skyscrapers have no cellar or attic, that life on the horizontal as at the Twin Towers tends to be dreamless, to lack all memory and hence awareness and aspiration.

If we judge from the desperate need for "lifestyle products", dreams are indeed dead. Most of us have given up even the pretence of an independent, vital personality with its desires intact. The powerful presence of Poller’s dolls’ house, its absolute sense that for most us, this is all there is, or can be, is a chilling reminder of everything we have lost. The house is now a graveyard of all our dreams, past and present. Poller gives the game away in two photos of the house, one empty, one full. The abstract coloured volumes of the empty one with its reek of freedom, the other is a stage set torture chamber where loss is piled on loss.

I had thought of calling this piece From Revolution to Retail - a headline as snappy, offensive and obnoxious as the finest work in our local paper, but, I suspect, most people have sold fresh out of irony and would not get the joke. We would be left with the proposition that the average reader can only think in banal pre-packed consumer cliches, the corporate equivalent of Sieg Heil, which I absolutely do not believe.

The catastrophic collapse of aspirational design was prompted by commodification. Early modernist designers thought that good design was an ethical proposition. It would be cheaper, more comfortable and demand less maintenance and memory space, leaving us free to live in our communities as we please. Above all it would release psychic energies for the community. These aspirations were never realised. Instead of life, we have lifestyle and that vicious, meaner, more impoverished every year. No one lives in our community any longer. Almost everyone, it seems, would rather have a tax cut than decent universal healthcare or education. The monstrous rotting carcasses of those early ideals, born of despairing desire, that choke Poller’s Doll’s House are more interesting to most people, certainly to our marketing based media, than palpable happiness and a well lived life

Am I the only one to have noticed the staggering absence of the arts from this election? When fat Kim announced the GST rollback, no one rolled over for art not even the buyers of new mercedes and imported, solid gold backscratchers. The GST has been an absolute disaster for artists, who are nearly always working on a knife edge cash flow and margins smaller than the smallest small business person would contemplate. Little Johnny hasn’t mentioned the arts either, but then he’s too busy playing with guns.

A decade ago there were serious votes in culture. At the very least politicians thought they could take pride in the arts as sign of national maturity and the vitality of our spirit. Now the arts, especially visual art, just don’t matter. The more they bleat for money the more the public yawns and Kim turns both fat cheeks wherever the wind blows.

Who can we blame? Not our contemporary artists I think, at least not most of them, even though they whinge continually. The public are no fools. The ever swelling administocracy and curatocracy that have battened on the visual arts has convinced them, in its own interests, that they are an industry. Unhappily blinded by their success these same people have been presenting the most complacent, mediocre, trivialising work they can find. It suits their careers better. Anything impassioned committed or even, for god’s sake, informed might cause trouble. This is a business after all, so why stir up the punters without cause.

This is boring the public to apoplexy. They might reasonably expect art to stir them up just a little more than afternoon television Until it can do this or at least remembers that it can do it, that same public will rightly hold the visual arts in contempt. Where for instance is the work about Little Johnny, the Tampa and refugees who throw their children into the sea, let alone the romance between Bin Ladin and George Bush. For his pains, mild mannered Malcolm Fraser was once presented to the nation as Darth Vader. When will art and artists get back some self respect and enough ethics to put the overpaid and idealistically challenged amongst us out with the garbage?

So why The Car Key Election?

Its a pun, stupid, But not just any pun. Fans of the ancient art of wife swapping will remember the blokes throwing all their car keys in the middle of the carpet to see who or what would pick them up, as a sign their wives were up for a quickie. The politicians are treating us like car keys or worse still old fashioned wives. My advice vote Green and leave by the back door.

More on the car key erection next week.