Arts & Culture
Pointing the finger
Published 04 December 1998
We used to fire arrows. Now we just follow them. Hugh Aldersey-Williamscomes over all sagittate
We'd be lost without them. We see dozens, perhaps hundreds of arrows in a day, on roads and in air-ports, on keyboards and web sites. We dare not disobey them, or rather it just wouldn't occur to us to do so. We'd run a red light sooner than turn against an arrow.
It's because arrows are on our side. They speed us on our way. For proof, look what they did in the Norfolk village of Starston. Last year, the county council removed half the traffic signs along the road that cut through the village. The aim was to recreate a sense of place and to prompt a "re-cognition" by drivers of the bucolic nature of the environment they were passing through. It worked. Car speeds dropped by nearly 10 per cent, and a number of other villages are now looking at similar schemes.
The arrow is universal. It is instantly recognisable no matter how it is drawn. We instinctively understand which way an arrow points. Indeed in English, the word "point" gives the clue. Arrows appear as symbols (not just arrows) in cave paintings. The arrow was one of man's first tools with a vector, unlike a club or a stone. And so it became one of our first signs. Where once we shot an arrow in order to kill and survive, now we follow them round supermarket car parks.
It seems only right to consult Alan Fletcher, one of the founders of the Pentagram design company, and a man who has designed a few arrows in his time. He describes how cliches, the French term for printing blocks, were gradually developed to display useful symbols in addition to letters, numbers and punctuation marks. The second oldest cliche is the arrow.
The oldest is the pointing finger. But the fingers favoured in Victorian times were an affectation even then, and oddly restricted given their ostensible purpose. They generally show a left hand, even though most of us point with our right. It's always a man's hand, cuffed and cufflinked. Strangest of all, they almost invariably point rightward.
So universal is our understanding of the arrow that it is hard to conceive of alternatives that would not be even worse kitsch than this. "What separates designer sheep from designer goats," says Fletcher, "is the ability to stroke a cliche until it purrs like a metaphor."
Fine talk, but the arrows of today rarely have such aims. Over the decades, they have become instead more abstract. Its long pedigree notwithstanding, even the basic arrow incorporates superfluous elements. In Arabic-speaking countries, it is more economically made up of just two strokes, shaft and barb. Our arrows have lost the fletches that were such a feature of the signs on the London Underground from the 1930s. They have lost their shafts. Even the remaining arrowheads have withered from sagittate to triangular. There's safety in minimalism. At least these vestiges still look more like arrows than those antique contraptions on speed-trap signs look like modern cameras.
A good designer shouldn't be too interested in arrows in any case. The objective, says Fletcher, should be to prevent the directorial from becoming dictatorial. Pentagram tried to bring sense to the labyrinth of the Victoria & Albert Museum not with crude pointers but with banners colour-coded according to the points of the compass.
A couple of weeks ago, Daniel Libeskind's Spiral won its final planning approval. There have since been some rearguard complaints that the building will not be functional. But what better place for such a building than the asylum that is the V&A. Functional or not, the building will practically be the soul of discretion compared to some of the fears that have been expressed. Published photographs of the architectural models of the scheme exaggerate the building's angularities and omit the plane trees along Exhibition Road that will in any case largely screen Libeskind's building from view as they do the unregarded extravagance of the Aston Webb Building and Henry Cole Wing now. All in all, the Spiral is marvellous news, but it is no Bilbao Guggenheim.
But I'm wandering. The V&A is a good place to get lost. An airport isn't; nor is a concert hall at 7.29pm. There is a line drawn on the ground all the way from Aldgate East Underground station to the Barbican Centre. An arrow, after all, is merely a line implied, an invitation to extrapolate. Inside the centre itself, however, there are no lines, and even an abundance of arrows is powerless to provide a sense of orientation.
Arrows are inescapable. There is a phallic explanation (isn't there always?). But sometimes an arrow is just an arrow. There is an explanation based on perception: lines taken to a vanishing point form an arrowhead when flattened into a plane before the viewer's eye. But the real answer surely lies with our hunting fathers. Just consider this: if we had evolved with cloven feet, the arrow would point the other way.
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