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
Out of stock
In Madison, Wisonsin I went into a store called Pop Deluxe to find a vending machine that was selling art. This was after a talk at a conference I was at that outlined the history of these new art-o-mat vending machines – machines made redundant from selling cigarettes repurposed for dispensing art. Set up by artist Clark Whittington of North Carolina, the numbers of these machines have grown and now there are 90 machines across the United States, with over 400 artists contributed mini pieces of art that go for five dollars a piece.
This is less about everyone being an artist and more about everyone owning a little, consequential, possibly gimmicky piece of art. But after discussing the implications of this little invention at the conference I felt I had to give it a go, and after stumbling about in the chic, fairly expensive store (with electric guitar shaped cheese graters and craftsy things like that) I found the machine on the mezzanine level.
Now, I put in the token that I bought for five dollars at the cash desk. Down it went and I was experiencing the joy of machine operation. However, once I had decided on my art piece, something about Paris and photography (the allure was too strong) the lever that should have released the package in true vending machine style did not work. After a series of yanks it did not yield and presuming that it was not working I pulled at another lever, releasing a pinhole camera device. The cashier had said when I decided on a piece I should let her know what I chose. When I said that my first choice was not available she merely said: “Yeah… we’re running out of a few of them.”
This little story draws attention to the limitations of participatory consumerism: you can only make individual choices that reflect inner preference if they have the item in stock. How often does Argos, or any other store, not have the thing you need? This deficiency of capitalism in mind, I recalled the easyjet puzzle discussed in the first blog of this research trip to the USA.
The easyjet advert left blank jigsaw shaped pieces on show. The presumption is that us, the consumers, fill in the gaps to create the perfect holiday but so often, as shown by the story of the art-o-mat, there just is not enough stock to satisfy our choices and endless wants. The missing piece remains missing and there is nothing capitalism can do about it.
The blue sky
The hardest part of any puzzle is the endless blue sky. An undefinable, endless mass of colour with no visual punctuation that makes it easy to put pieces together. I always left these pieces to last. With the outside frame set – the easier part because one of the sides would be perfectly straight – the only thing left would be a pile of blue pieces with haphazard interlocking contours. Taking on the ‘sky’ part of the puzzle is the most demanding as you would spend hours and hours just to create a flat blue with no features. A mindless task, it might seem, but a lot of labour goes into the creation of the simple plane of colour.
This endless blue seems to portray a constructed nothingness.
Two forty foot high doric columns stretch into the sky at the northern entrance to Chicago’s Cancer survivors garden in Grant Park near the Institute of Art in the city. The pillars were salvaged from a 1905 Chicago federal building and create one of the city’s more obscure upward elevations. However, unlike the gargantuan skyscrapers that surround it the columns look as if they should support something. You construct something in its absence, and the columns are more likely to stay in the mind than if they were in situ, much in the same way a painting given huge white space in a gallery attracts more attention than a wall frame-to-frame with paintings.
Seems to be a thing in the States recently, look at the National Capitol Columns – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Capitol_Columns.
Easyjet puzzle
Easyjet, the budget airline company, has used the puzzle to communicate a vision of infinite adaptability for its new holiday planning service. Travel agents quake in their boots at the prospect of the introduction of another ‘cutting out the middle-man’ policy that seems to characterise a world where the consumer is in complete command over the product’s creation.
The gaps in the puzzle are not just opportunities to introduce easyjet’s logo and the eye-catching price, but suggest an incomplete product that we as consumers have to fill in with our own individual wants and desires. Rather than relying on travel agents to craft us the perfect holiday the onlooker is invited to finish the product off, a task, that according to the 1960s psychologist of consumer desire Ernest Dichter, improves the marketability of the product: ‘a sculpture, painting, or poster is better if somewhat incomplete, if the onlooker is invited to fill it in’ (1).
But easyjet have forgotten an inherent feature of puzzles. As French novelist of everyday life Georges Perec explained in Life: a user’s manual:
‘… despite appearances puzzling is not a solitary game: every move the puzzler makes, the puzzle-maker has made before… every blunder and every insight, each hope and each encouragement have all been designed, calculated and decided by the other.’ (2)
All those spaces to fill in in one’s own construction of the perfect Roman holiday, have been designed by the puzzle-maker who has determined the shape of each piece, each little interlocking nodule, and the image. Easyjet give the illusion of a customisable holiday through the use of the puzzle, but the gaps represent permitted choice within the wider, inflexible expectations of holiday experience that easyjet have created. Part of this is the expectation that the best experience of Rome is the one evoked in the image, the perfect sunset, perhaps with a friendly Italian waiter serving a linguine and a glass of Pinot Grigio to the side? The idyllic postcard image, so often thought to be a sign of a holiday’s success. Surely we would want to fill the gaps in the top left with a continuation of the light pink sky.
No. If this was a genuine puzzle the remaining gaps would surely be filled in with images of baggage hall reclaim waiting, miscommunication, a tepid meal, an overly priced bottle of wine, a sense of not knowing how to behave. It would cause an interruption to the image, of course, but then easyjet is leaving the canvas blank for us to fill in.
I’m going on a research trip to America for the next couple of weeks, and although it is not a holiday (as I keep trying to explain to my non-student friends!) I will be going to a place I have never been before. Taking easyjet’s lead I will describe my experience there as a puzzle in future blogs. It is doubtful that it would be as coherent and idyllic as the image above. I am sure that a lot of the pieces will be indistinctive, hard to place and sometimes will not fit together very well. Maybe some of the pieces are missing or have suffered neglect with others looking like they have freshly come out of the factory. We’ll see.
‘Sketch to Product’ blog
I have written a guest post for the V&A’s ‘Sketch to Product’ blog called ‘Playing God: architects and railway models. Please follow the link.
Digital aid
To help visitors to the Afghanistan exhibition at the British Museum visualise the architecture of the ancient town of Ai Khanoum, a digital representation of ‘how it would have been’ is sandwiched between various hulks of stone and information placards. This eastern outpost of Alexander the Great’s vast empire, built in 4th century BC, is rendered immaculately.
The surfaces of the digitalised columns and facades have a perfectly weathered look, like the recently cleaned Exhibition Road facade of the Victoria and Albert Museum. Eyes, more used to passive televisual spectatorship than staring at an inert object, slide on to the smoothness of the image.
In perhaps the most faddish scene of the reconstruction, ghostly, watery and transparent outlines of human forms walk through the space without obscuring the view of the architecture. The priority is to show off the accuracy of archeological research, it would seem, the contours of the human body erased as much as possible. Barely visible, these humans are projections of orderly activity; behaving themselves, much like the optimistic, cool and happy images of people you see in digitalised projections of multi-use leisure, retail and office complexes.
A model of the past, an indication as to the expected movements of people. But Ai Khanoum is dusty too, just look.
Amateur politicians
Andrew Neil’s programme ‘Posh and Posher’ shown on BBC two on Wednesday 26th January was sure to attract the attention of many television critics – the idea that politics is a closed shop for only those that went to Eton and Oxbridge is pretty topical with Cameron and Clegg on the top of the political ladder. They all coalesce around the idea that Andrew Neil asked good questions as the Guardian put it, but did not give any answers (Guardian, Independent, Mail).
The most poignant issue that the programme raised was not about posh and posher: this was the catchy title that went together well with the stock images of top hats, affluent looking boys and wonderfully old schools, all objects of desire that are symbols of luxury and privilege. A better title, although a little awkward, would have been ‘professional and professionaler’.
The worry is not that more and more politicians come from Oxford, Cambridge, and Eton and Westminster before them but that we are witnessing a professionalisation of politics. This means that the Politics Philosophy and Ethics course in Oxbridge is a rubber stamp of approval, like a Dentistry qualification for a dentist, assuring progression to the next stage. Then you become a SPAD (special advisor) to a prominent minister in Westminster and then you are put on some shortlist to be an MP in some area you have no prior knowledge of.
If the idea of democracy is to represent then it would be good for parties to field more local candidates on election shortlists, and for the political system to make it easier for independent candidates to stand without towing a party’s line.
The call is for amateur politicians, those who know little about the Westminster village but a lot about the area they represent having perhaps been brought up there, or having lived there for a few years, or even worked there – basically a more solid connection than Tristam Hunt with Stoke-on-Trent Central. This might add a little spice to the proceedings at Westminster, like politicians who came through the Unions (although bumbling, John Prescott made politics more interesting).
It is difficult to foresee a revival in postmen becoming politicians through the Unions (like Alan Johnson), as they themselves have become increasingly professionalised, mirroring the wider phenomenon. But perhaps a liberalisation of politics is needed where a lawyer, journalist, CEO, nurse, postman, can spend their free time involved in politics to a degree more in-depth than watching Newnight and listening to the Today programme. It already happens in the political system – local councillors – but maybe we should see this local system translated to the national. Otherwise it will be the continuation of smart guys more interested in metropolitan power than representing people.
