The term “gimmick”, and its related adjective “gimmicky”, are often bandied about, both in a golf context and not. Off the top of our heads, we can all likely cite some specific features, or perhaps even entire golf courses, that we would consider as being just that: a gimmick or gimmicky. Asked to provide an example of one, some might cite one of the “replica courses”, whether Wooden Sticks in Toronto, World Tour Golf Links in Myrtle Beach, or Tour 18 in Dallas, as tourist-trap gimmicks. Others might consider a double-green, an ill-forced template such as the dreadful-looking biarritz that was recently built at Oxmoor Valley on the RTJ Golf Trail, or a heavy-handed feature such as the rock wall crossing the 17th at The Paintbrush in Toronto, as gimmicky. And perhaps some may even consider the entire notion of transplanting the Lido from Long Island to both Wisconsin and Thailand as a gimmick. Once again, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
A gimmick is not necessarily a bad thing, although it tends to carry with it a negative connotation, as something whose novelty, or initial attractiveness, tends to wither quickly. More or less, everyone can cite an array of things, golf-related or otherwise, that they believe to be gimmicky; however, elucidating precisely why they feel that way about a certain thing—but not another—is commonly a little more challenging. For example, few golfers, if any, would cite any of The Old Course’s double greens as being “gimmicky”, whereas any new one built is likely to be viewed as such, by at least a certain segment of golfers, including, I will admit, myself. Why one but not the other?
A few years ago, Sianne Ngai published Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form, and it caused quite the stir, since becoming a touchstone work in areas of affect theory and cultural studies. The book’s catchphrase, or motto, if you will, is that “repulsive and yet strangely attractive, the gimmick is a form that can be found virtually everywhere in capitalism”, and that the gimmick can “strikes us both as working too little (a labor-saving trick) and as working too hard (a strained effort to get our attention).”
the gimmick can “strikes us both as working too little (a labor-saving trick) and as working too hard (a strained effort to get our attention).
Sianne Ngai
A decade prior, Ngai rose to prominence thanks to the publication of her second book, entitled Our Aesthetic Categories. Above all, in it, she is preoccupied with exploring which sorts of artworks are apt to engender which sorts of emotions, or affects, and why that is so. To unweave each and every fine detail of her argument would be far too exhaustive for this platform; however, the three categories around which her study is centered are “the zany”, “the cute” (or, more specifically, its root, “the acute”), and “the interesting.” These are not, as Ngai reminds us however, the only three aesthetic categories of judgment; but they are the most prescient, in that they speak most directly to the “everyday practices of production, circulation, and consumption” of the current zeitgeist: “they are the terms in our current repertoire best suited for grasping how aesthetic experience has been transformed by the hypercommodified, information-saturated, performance-driven conditions of late capitalism.”
As Peter Szendy cleverly presented it, images and videos, upon being published, become shelf-fodder in sort of grand “supermarket of the sensible”, in which they then compete—and also combine—with other forms of media commodities in order to attract, distract, shape and reshape the consumer, through a market of senses or sensorial perceptions that is conditioned by social, economic, and environmental factors, among other things. Put simply, they vie for our attention, tempting us, luring us, all while simultaneously playing upon and molding our tastes. See, for example, the recent TikTok led craze for the pale, granny, discolored, and unabashedly nostalgic toned palette of the Fujifilm X100, made most prominent in the films of Wes Anderson, in this era gone mad for retro and commemoration, brought about by society’s widespread inability to perceive for itself a bright future anymore, as Simon Reynolds and Mark Fisher both surmised. Ngai wants us to believe that art matters; and how we respond, consume, and discuss art reveals the deeper, underlying trends and tendencies of society (why have streaming and TV shows effectively smothered the demand for longer films and the cinema over these last few years?) Whether knowingly or not, we ceaselessly make aesthetic judgements, alongside the daily practices of working, consuming, and exchanging. Commonly, we don’t even realize that we are doing so, because these are subconscious (which is what affect theorists are largely concerned with in their studies). Thus, Ngai is primarily interested in the economic underpinnings of aesthetic judgment; and, secondly, with the way affective judgments are then built into nomenclature. To use a golf-relate example now, why is Charleston Municipal “cool”, whereas World Tour Golf Links is “lame, forced, and gimmicky” (after all, they are both merely comprised of borrowed holes—why is the redan an okay “template” to mimic, and not the 13th at Augusta National—who decrees this, and why?)
Returning to her most recent work, she notes that the “gimmick” is not a 4th category of aesthetic judgment, but rather that it is “an undercurrent running through all three—and indeed, all of capitalist culture.” As Andrew Koening nicely condenses it, “the gimmick, she (Ngai) contends, is the capitalist form par excellence. The book’s argument starts from the simple premise that the gimmick is “simultaneously overperforming and underperforming,” confounding our normal estimations of labor, value, and time.”
If this seems ubiquitous, seems hard-to-pin down, then that is precisely Ngai’s point: “the gimmick simultaneously saves labor and does not save labor; works too hard and too little; is outdated and newfangled; is dynamic and static; is unrepeatable and reusable; and transparent/obscure about capitalist production.” Capitalism is, after all, rife with such contradictions, simultaneously omnipresent yet nowhere, fundamentally schizophrenic, to use Deleuze and Guattari’s famous analogy.
The gimmick simultaneously saves labor and does not save labor; works too hard and too little; is outdated and newfangled; is dynamic and static; is unrepeatable and reusable; and transparent/obscure.
Ngai
If, as I proposed some months ago, the recent rise of template laden golf is the result of the logic of “postmodernism”—which, in turn, is “the cultural logic of late capitalism” according to Sizek and Jameson—, then at least according to the definition put forth by Ngai, templates fit into the framework of the “gimmick.” In particular, templates are both “working too little (a labor-saving trick) and working too hard (a strained effort to get our attention).” In the most basic sense, templates are familiar, ready-made frameworks, adaptable, malleable, and moldable to essentially any plot of land; and their recent rise, or return, to prominence, both in practice and in discourse, is the due to the conditions of golf architecture in the “post-modern age” (i.e. the last decade or so, likely following the construction of Old Macdonald). They are especially useful on plots of land with little, if any, natural playing interest, such as Winter Park and Charleston Municipal, which are places where, otherwise, the architect would have been forced to delve into his bag of tricks and tropes, usually through strategic, varied bunkering and intense green complexes, in order to produce a consistently memorable golf course over the course of eighteen holes. The use of templates thus epitomizes the aforementioned contradiction inherent to the “gimmick:” it is both a labor saving trick (i.e. a cut and paste model that eliminates the need to fashion a golf hole from one’s own head), as well as strained effort to get our attention (i.e. in that the architect superimposes a model that naturally conflicts with what the land, itself, provides). And, contradictorily, the architect therefore simultaneously underperforms, in that he/she does not fashion a golf hole from his/her own hand and mind, and overperforms, in that he/she provides something zany and interesting, which, as we have seen over the last few years, draws interest, regardless of the land and location.
Along this line of thinking, namely that they provide ready-made frameworks that are adaptable to a variety of sites, they thus provide labor saving tricks—both physical labor as well as intellectual labor—in a period when, in all aspects of society, resources and labor, especially, have become scarce. One need not look further than the newest, cookie-cutter neighborhood going up at the edge of virtually every North American town. At least until recently, in many places, the demand outweighed the supply, meaning not only a rise in housing prices, but also a struggle for contractors to acquire sufficient materials and summon a big enough labor force to provide for said demand. Likewise, golf architecture saw a boom, one about which no architect is complaining, but has nevertheless stretched most firms thin, with the various leads hop-scotching from one project to another, oftentimes on different continents. As such, their long time and trusty crew members have had less time on site, less of an opportunity to collaborate, and many firms have had to rely on temporary or less familiar laborers and shapers to meet this hitherto unseen demand. Moreover, because of it, project timelines have been accelerated, meaning that the lead architects have had less and less time to craft, work, and rework their various projects than ever before. This is, of course, not reserved merely to golf construction, but society wide with the extension of the work day, the increasing casualization and temporization of the workforce, a lack of training and continuing education afterwards, and an increase in anxiety and other mental-health issues related to overworking, overanxiety, and overstimulation. In fact, the “death of the craftsman” has been widely explored. In particular, John Roberts provides an acute and unique perspective in his article, “Art After Deskilling”; and his illuminations, I believe, are apt to golf architecture and construction. The incorporation of a handful of templates can, although not necessarily, save the architect the intellectual labor of having to fashion holes, as well as being on site as regularly, showing and guiding his crew through the construction as closely as he would with an original hole. Yet the architect is also delivering something riveting, enticing; and therein lies that aforementioned contradiction once again.
On the ownership side, even though the architect has provided something borrowed, something that is not necessarily unique, they remain appealing precisely for the same reasons that they capture clicks on social media: namely, the three aesthetic categories elucidated by Ngai, which, in turn, engender an affective reaction in the consumer, after an encounter with an image. It is, of course, not only outright templates, but also other explicitly borrowed concepts, such as railroad ties, bulkheads, and nipple-shaped mounds, among others, that we’ve seen increasingly incorporated, and of course heavily promoted, in new designs and redesigns, often to compelling affect, too. Whether we like them or not, whether we believe they have been overused by now or not, and whether we understand their origins or not, they nevertheless remain interesting—we feel something but we’re not yet sure what to think—, zany—unusual, outlandish, even awkward—, and (a)cute—sharp, severe, shrewd. In other words, they are bright, familiarly plump and tasty fruits to which the consumer’s eye is drawn when he/she pushes his/her shopping cart through “the supermarket of the sensible”—i.e. social media and traditional print mostly, although templates, and their specific features, have become so popular that they are now discussed sporadically on network TV broadcasts.
Aside from their obvious aesthetic appeal, the overwhelming exposure of templates is also due to the fact that, like cover songs, they provide easy entry points into the discourse of golf architecture, a discourse that, over the last decade or so, has grown from a niche topic to a rather mainstream one. Of course, when commodities gain mainstream appeal it commonly engenders a dilution under the guise of “accessibility”, another contradiction of capitalism that Ngai diagnoses when she claims that we “simultaneously know too much and too little.” In effect, most now know too much, in that they can grasp what differentiates a template from a normal golf hole, but too little, too, in that they can’t or are not willing to educate themselves enough to go beyond a surface level discussion about some of their evident characteristics.
David Byrne concluded that “an artist is now a curator. An artist is now much more seen as a connector of things, a person who scans the enormous field of possible places for artistic attention, and says, what I am going to do is draw your attention to this sequence of things.”
In the mid 1990s, David Byrne, of Talking Heads fame, concluded that “an artist is now a curator. An artist is now much more seen as a connector of things, a person who scans the enormous field of possible places for artistic attention, and says, what I am going to do is draw your attention to this sequence of things.” This is true, and it is not necessarily a bad thing, for templates, as I have stated, are (a)cute, enticing, interesting, riveting, and zany. Yet it is not only the artist who has become a curating of things, but the critic, too, as evidenced by how often C.B, Macdonald, Raynor, Travis, redans, bottles, edens, etc, are brought up, on discussion boards, in podcasts, and in essentially every review of the newest golf courses. However, a legitimate golf architecture criticism cannot merely scan the field, drawing lines of influence, connecting things; it needs to go beyond evaluating golf holes and golf courses merely as forms and shapes. And so do, I would suggest, new golf architects: make it new, put a different spin on the familiar, the now too familiar.
