Jeremy Deller: Valerie’s Snack Bar
It took me a while to pluck up the courage to go and sit in Jeremy Deller’s recreation of Valerie’s Snack Bar in his retrospective Hayward show last week. I spent a long time looking at the mindmap by the side of the Snack Bar, flitting my eyes between the illustration and the red seats, looking for a moment where there was a free space where I would not inconvenience an existing sitter.
There was a couple of young mums bottle feeding their babies (as if from Stoke Newington) on one of the tables, a couple of men (one of whom looked like Julian Assange) having an in-depth political conversation, and a small family on their day off.
I walked into bar, asked for a tea and slotted into one of the plastic seats. It was cosy, snug. The design put you close to other people, closer than most cafes (probably as it is a recreation of a snack bar in a market). It was a level of proximity only seen in galleries when you are pushing past people in one of the capital’s exhibition blockbusters.
There was an art student writing on a napkin opposite me, many individuals reading the gallery guide, people chatting, watching the video of the procession in Manchester which the recreated snack bar was originally a part. What was common to all the participants in this installation was a level of self-consciousness that even the proprietor and her waitresses could not efface with their chat about baking and a friend who was applying to study at the Courtauld. This seemed to prompt those eye avoidance actions most common to lifts and being on the tube: reading, playing with mobile phones, and in this case watching other people outside the cafe. When you did catch the eyes of gallery-goers ambling around the piece you felt complicit in Deller’s act, when you spotted them looking at you slurping on your builder’s tea you felt a bit like an object denied of anonymity, in the background to someone else’s tourist photo.
Photography was used by people within the installation to render their experience static. The napkin writer opposite me took a picture of her off-the-cuff prose with her ipone (perhaps to send immediately to someone else online or blog in some way) and there were lots of people taking pictures of their free teas. Hardly normal behavior in a cafe, although interestingly not that rare given our increasing photo-mediated world.
Director of the Hayward, Ralph Rugoff associated Deller with the 1990s re-definition of what art is, working in a ‘different’ way, ‘working collaboratively, working with different kinds of social groups’. Surely Rugoff has in mind the artists Nicolas Bourriaud mentions in his work Relational Aesthetics (Tiravanija, Gonzalez-Torres, Beecroft, etc.)
So what of this ‘situation’ that Deller has created (alongside the comfy discussion space next to his 2009 project ‘It is what it is’ which involved touring a burnt out car from the Iraq war through the heart of America). Its clearly an unusual cafe experience. Not only is the tea completely free, but you are aware of some outside force (maybe a combination of Jeremy Deller, the Hayward institution and the form of the cafe) telling you to behave as if you are in a cafe. This level of self-consciousness this encourages is common to the participants of artworks that create a situation: the work does not make art out of an existing social experience, but puts a frame around this social experience, isolates it in some way, and creates entirely new social and aesthetic conditions.
Unfortunately, this metamorphosis of social act to performance is often flattened by artists, galleries and funding bodies who want to claim that art can be radically inclusive, and that a social act can be art. As Julian Stallabrass claims there is a mythology to this that helps prop up a status quo in the globalised art market. Yet if we emphasise the obvious displacement that happens in participatory art we might move to a different critical terrain.
For example, the Deller’s cafe in the Hayward is clearly unreal in many ways, but being within the displaced cafe draws the participant’s attention to what exists within cafes, within one’s own memory (imagined, viewed or experienced). By what is absent and conspicuously recreated we recall something tangible. The glimmers of social action – chat, laughter, texting, avoiding eye contact – alert us to those other social experiences within cafes, and like well-placed brushstrokes on a painting provide an insight in to what the artist is trying to say about something. With Deller’s work, one suspects he is praising the carnival-esque, familial status of British greasy-spoon, working-man and motorway lay-by-type cafes.
The feeling of displacement in the recreated cafe alerts us to the social experiences of cafes in our mind within a specific historical-social existance, and this is not an insignificant ambition for an artwork.
Text Keypad
The days of the texting keypad on the mobile phone are surely numbered. Smartphones are gradually replacing buttons in the world of telecommunications, and with it, the concept of the text keypad where each number doubles up as a series of letters (1 standing in for punctuation; 2 – abc; 3 – def; 4 – ghi; 5 – jkl; 6 – mno; 7 – pqrs; 8 – tuv; and 9 – wxyz).
Anticipating its future decline, and as I own one of these phones myself at the moment, I thought to bring attention to this particular system of texting. Not only does my phone limit me to the 9 buttons of the keypad but it does not have predictive text, meaning I have to press buttons repeated times to get to the letter I need. This makes texts with heavy use of the ‘s’ very time-consuming, having to press 7 four times before you get there. And then there are the words with the ‘ight’ ending that take an age because the middle three letters are all on the 4 meaning you have to wait each time for the cursor on the text screen to compose itself. You not likely to get a text that says ‘I take flight, at the fright in the light night’.
To illuminate the limitations of this texting lexicon I will play a game: how many words can be made on the button-mobile phone without pressing the same button multiple times (so therefore using only the first letter on each number button) and without the clever magic of predictive texting. There are only a limited a number of letters – a, d, g, j, m, p, t, w – but when you make a word from a combination of these letters on these old phones it is very satisfying, as if you’ve stumbled on a convenience that is taken for granted on smartphones.
Just as extra rules: no repetition allowed (so no ‘aa’ or ‘dd’); and the words below exclude abbreviations – apart from ones that amused me. The dictionary used is a widget on my mac OS X operating system, and are sometimes elaborated upon by this author.
(This word game is inspired by chapter 60 of Georges Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual. This chapter concerns a man called Cinoc, a name whose spelling caused problems for the concierge and residents of the block of flats that is the principle subject of this seminal work. Perec wrote twenty alternate spellings of this name based on how you pronounce different parts of the word – for example is the ‘c’ pronounced ‘s’, ‘sh’, ‘ts’ or ‘ch’, and is the last ‘c’ pronounced ‘ts’, ‘ch’ or ‘k’. Like other parts of this novel, Perec accounts for diversity within rigid schema, patterns and pre-determined rules, and in the process illuminates everyday concerns in all their richness.)
- ad – prefix, denoting motion or direction to.
- adam – the first man
- adapt – make something for a new use or purpose, modify (perhaps the best word on the list, the high pointer!)
- am – 1st person singular present of be.
- amp – unit of electrical current.
- ap – variant spelling of ad- assimilated before p, as in ‘apposite’
- apt – entirely suitable. ‘This blog is apt for the age of fast-paced communication’.
- at – expressing location or arrival in a particular place.
- aw – exclamation used to express mild protest.
- dad – father, one who begot you
- dada – art movement of the early twentieth century including Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia among its followers. Playful, yet serious, this movement raised fundamental questions as to what constituted artistic skill and labour. Also the French for hobby.
- dag – Australian/NZ, informal – an unfashionable or socially conservative person.
- damp – slightly wet, good description of English weather, most of the time, or ‘how it should be’.
- dap – fish by letting the fly bob lightly on the water.
- data – facts and statistics, information.
- daw – another term for jackdaw.
- gad – go around from one place to another in pursuit of entertainment.
- gag – a thing, usually a piece of cloth, put in or other a person’s mouth to prevent speaking or crying out. Think Pulp Fiction or the recent super injunctions in political life – ‘gagging orders’
- gaga – overexcited or irrational, typically as a result of infatuation. Appears in Queen song. Pop star of our age.
- gam – a leg, especially in reference to the shapeliness of a woman’s leg.
- gamp – dated British phrase for a large umbrella (again topical word for a very wet season – April 2012)
- gap – a break or hole in an object or between two objects. Fashion label.
- gat – a revolver or pistol.
- gawp – stare openly in a stupid or rude manner.
- jag – a sharp projection.
- jam – sweet, fruity substance on toast or a to squeeze or pack into a tight space.
- jat – a member of people widely scattered throughout the northwest of the Indian subcontinent.
- jaw – bones that form the framework of the mouth.
- mad – mentally ill, insane.
- madam – used to address a woman in a very polite way.
- mam – one’s mother (british) or polite address for a woman
- mama – one’s mother (especially as a child’s term).
- map – a 2d representation of an area, land or terrain. Verb – to record detail in the spatial arrangement of things, both geographic, chronological or philosophical.
- mat – thing you lay on, protective.
- matamata – a grotesque South American freshwater turtle.
- maw – the jaws or throat of a voracious animal.
- pa – informal for father.
- pad – soft material to reduce friction, notebook, or preceded by ‘i’ to name a recent technology.
- pajama – American spelling of bedclothes.
- pap – bland, soft or semiliquid food as that which is suitable for babies.
- papa – one’s father.
- pat – touch quickly and gently with the palm of the hand.
- pawpaw – another term for papaya.
- ta – thanks
- tad – to a small extent, somewhat.
- tag – a label attached to someone or something for purposes of identification.
- taj – a conical cap worn by a dervish
- tamp – pack a blast hole full of clay or sand to concentrate the force of an explosion.
- Tampa – Florida city.
- tap – a device that regulates the flow of water.
- tapa – the bark of a paper mulberry tree.
- tat – make decorative mat or edging by tying knots in thread.
- taw – make hide into leather without the use of tannin.
- twa- a member of a pygmy people inhabiting parts of Burundi, Rwanda and Congo.
- twat – a person regarded as stupid or obnoxious.
- wad – a lump or bundle of a soft material.
- wag – in reference to animals, move or cause to move rapidly to and fro.
- wagamama – restaurant chain (it had to be in there)
- wat – a Buddhist monastery or temple.
Have I missed any?
Art non nouveau
“Decadence”, “opulence”, “sex”, “curves”, “glamour”, “luxury”, “nature”, “butterfly”: these words fly around the first episode of Stephen Smith’s BBC documentary on Art Nouveau with the same abandon as the legs of a fin-de-siècle cabaret dancer. Smith, assisted by the medley of five-second splices of Paris (in which he often figures), seems intent on whipping viewers up in a frenzy, in trajectories familiar to the sinuous iron curves that spread from Guimard’s Parisian Metro entrances. This is not a comfortable fit for Smith, whose deadpan delivery and style of disinterestedness is better suited for mocu-mentary style reports for Newsnight (like the brilliant one on the government’s Big Society programme). The summarisation of an art movement seems too broad a subject for him and this leaves the impression that he is reading from someone else’s script.
The clichés are inevitable in a programme of such scope, but the lack of contextualisation was surprising. Art Nouveau was accepted at face value as being completely new. Artists always insist that their work is new but surely art history programmes should interrogate these assumptions: of course Alphonse Mucha’s grandson will say he was the first to bring art to the masses through his ebullient posters.
Why were the links between Art Nouveau and Impressionism, Post-impressionism and religion ignored? There was no mention of the Nabis – the trained fine artists who first turned to the decorative after meetings with the ‘wild’ Gauguin – and the absence of any discussion on the huge influence of Japanese imports on late-nineteenth century French art and design was almost criminal. The opening of art dealer Siegfried Bing’s Maison de l’Art Nouveau in Paris in 1895 reflects the importance of Japonisme and general love of the Orient in this movement. He employed Tiffany, Toulouse-Lautrec and Maurice Denis in designing his store, but more importantly played a major role in bringing Japanese art and design to France (see Nancy Troy, Modernism and the Decorative Arts in France: Art Nouveau to Le Corbusier New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001). Even the wavey iron that is much admired as new has its precedent in the earlier nineteenth century Parisian arcades. Paris by the 1890s had been a spectacle for quite some time.
The second half of the programme introduced more complexity. We heard about Gallé’s commitment to social justice and his defence of the disgraced Jewish army officer Alfred Dreyfus, who was wrongfully accused of treason in 1894.
Stephen Smith gets close to the murkier side of nature
And when Smith stressed the movements obsession with the hybridisation of insect and female form he is animated, stating how the last interior he visits seems like it is produced by a hyper-evolved bee. This link to evolving perceptions of science and nature hints at the palpable anxiety behind Art Nouveau: biomimicry hinting at the increasing realisation in the modern world of an unstable barrier between nature and human, object and subject; a concern that stays with us today.
Art Nouveau was an unusual movement: artists associated with its rise did not write a manifesto stipulating its intentions like later cubists, futurists and surrealists. This leaves it up to art historians to find their own ‘unofficial’ starting points. Yet perhaps a lack of coherence is what Art Nouveau is really about. Often thought of as composite, an attempt to synthesise the confusion of different styles that had been gathering apace throughout the nineteenth century, Art Nouveau in Paris was a fluid, ambiguous term, not completely consistent with the seductive, l’art pour l’art, sexy, guide book-esque image presented by this programme.
Roof-pile-fire: an amateur’s Shedboatshed
In 2005 the English artist Simon Starling won the coveted Turner prize with a work called Shedboatshed. The work involved the artist dismantling a shed, making a boat out of its parts, then paddling the boat and the remainder of the material down the River Rhine to be re-made back into a shed in a museum in Basel.
This strategy of situating the work’s subject as ‘the labour expended to produce it’ (Mark Godfrey, Frieze Magazine) is a common trope within Starling’s oeuvre. The final works he puts on show on the gallery is the mere tip of the iceberg of his production procedures, which instead of hiding like the majority of artists, he foregrounds as the main content of his work. In Kakteenhaus (2002), Starling drove a cactus from the Andalucian desert to a Berlin gallery in his red Volvo. The cactus stood tall in the gallery, with the Volvo’s engine – removed from the car, but still running – maintaining a perfect temperature for cactus sustenance through a network of heating pipes.
Although I have nothing to show for it apart from some photographs – no video, no proposal to take over a gallery space, and no sculptural product – throughout this Summer at my parents house (where I have been based) I have witnessed a regenerative, circular process of production, recycling and consumption, that has at least some of the hallmarks of Starling’s process-exposing art.
One of the changes that has taken place during the conversion of my parent’s house from a temporary log cabin to a permanent farmhouse (meeting all the building regulations) has been to install a thermal blanket over the roof of the existing cabin and put on a new roof. Rather than installing the insulation from the inside, as is conventional, my parents’ builders ripped off the existing roof and installed insulation from the outside, with the new roof going on top of it. The warm weather made this possible and the external nature of the work caused minimum disruption inside and did not ruin the existing internal ceiling. Another benefit was a glut of leftover tongue and groove timber that had formally been the roof.
This excess is a sort of brown gold in a climate of rising fuel costs (for wood as well as gas and oil), and my parents stacked it up in an unconventional log pile. Less handsome than cylinders of chestnut, more like a massive IKEA project gone wrong.
The amount of excess wood has provided my parents a handy fuel supply for the winter. And although there is still slight residue of tar on some of the planks, my Dad simply said that we should burn these pieces of wood one at a time. Each day more and more of the old roof is brought in for fuel. This wood will keep my parents warm throughout the long, harsh winters that the South-East has become accustomed to recently!
Yet the circle of material-production-consumption does not end at the neat idea that the roof is now heating the house, but goes further into Starling-esque realms of intricacy. The wood from the old roof, now fuel, goes a lot further because the new roof – insulated to the hilt – increases energy efficiency. The timber of old roof that took the rain, ice and winds of many seasons is now coming to the end of its days in the most productive manner.
Puzzle perfect
Edmonton in Alberta, Canada, would not be the first place on many people’s list for honeymoon destinations. It has a good university, but the 100 year-old city (building up around the fur and timber trade) has not much else beside, apart from the largest shopping mall in North America. Since reading Kingdom Come, by J G Ballard, shopping malls have come alive in my imagination.
Shopping Mall visits are reassuring: you know the rules no matter where the mall is. Walk the upstairs circuit, then the downstairs, walk part every shop to see what you can find. Feel anonymous whilst reassured that others are also attempting to carve out their own consumer identity within the space.
Edmonton Mall’s designers tried to make the floor plan as confusing as possible to negotiate so that people would get lost and spend more (a common trick among Mall designers). But it was the attraction of Europa Alley, the giant wave pool and a massive replica of Colombus’s Santa Maria that knocked my internal compass.
If Richard Pearson, the lead character of Ballard’s Kingdom Come, was to start his investigation of the link between consumerism, fascism and violence in this Mall, he would find a full-sized plastic re-imagination of the Santa Maria as a weapon in waiting. Maybe the ship is amply stocked with plastic cannon balls.
Above the ice rink a cluster of tanks are home to a fish exotica from around the world. This is a clownfish gulping away at his own reflection in front of the store Family Vision Care (curious that their website also uses fish to advertise its products). Behind, a Blue Tang charges around, and you suddenly realise that this mini-aquarium is full of the characters from Finding Nemo by Pixar. Presumably this is to keep the children occupied as tired mothers negotiate the amount of bags they can fit on their children’s buggies.
There is no puzzle in the shopping mall, it all fits together with such ease. There were renovations of one elevator but people happily took the stairs. There is a mini golf course to unwind, with individuals making the most of the ’3cm away from the edge rule’ to line up their easy puts. Colouring books with outlined Gauguin paintings.
There is the explanation knocking about that Canada’s love affair with the shopping mall is due to the fact they are well-heated in the cold winter. No need to excuse yourself Edmontonians, this place is great!
The easy bit
There are parts of a puzzle that are full of detail, the central image that is incredibly easy to discern. Maybe its a notable building, the boat in the middle of the sea and the sky or a human figure that draws in the eye. It is the bit of the puzzle that is easiest to do because you quickly recognise the image that you are making, either because it is the reason you got the puzzle in the first place or it is the part of the image on the front of the box that you most want to complete. However jagged and irregular the cut of the pieces, they seem to lock together with ease because you have already put the image together in your mind.
The same can be said for constructing your own holiday puzzle. There are images that are central; places that you know about because of their ubiquity (like the Eiffel Tower) or places that you desperately want to see that you research about in advance. For this trip to the USA the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC was clearly something I was aware of in advance, from movies like the remake of Planet of the Apes, and with my limited time in the city I had to go.
It was mid afternoon on a glorious, sunny day when I walked up to the Lincoln Memorial, after walking to the Jefferson and Roosevelt memorials. It was busy. The cool of the marble floor in front of the long extract from his second inaugural address was a good place to contemplate.
But this being the part of everyone’s holiday puzzle means that it is easy to visit with restrooms, refreshments, multiple tour coaches that will drop you there – a whole tourist infrastructure that surrounds any national site of interest. Most people have created an image of the memorial before they see it, built up from films, reading books and receiving postcards. This makes it seemingly easy to visit, just turn up and take a photo. But remember you still have to put the pieces together. Why have you come to see the memorial, what does Abraham Lincoln mean to you and what do you make of his speech extracts?
Pavement 18: Van Gogh
