History lessons revisited.
‘So as historians .............. we are interested in finding out how things
have stayed the same and how things are different ........’
That snippet of didacticism might have been lurking at the
back of my mind as I began devising an installation for Waltham Forest Arts
Club’s residency in one of the shop-units at Wood Street Indoor Market. How has
the market changed since Tuesday 13th December 2011 when Jay Gort
and others entertained a throng of interested market punters looking for low
cost commercial, urban and/or cultural niches?
Let’s fast forward via an array of bespoke Waltham Forest Arts
Club manifestations to the end of May and the installation of ‘Carriage’. In
‘Carriage’, the Arts Club pop up gallery (pug) was presented as a locked and
blacked out space that murkily reflected the surroundings. For most of the week
that was the limited presence or role of the club within the indoor market
community. Residents and visitors might have wondered about the substance of
the darkness behind the glass. Could it have been solid or hollow? A brief
inspection by those interested enough could have discovered the all too
apparent limits of the creator’s dark craft in the overlapping planes of porous
high intensity black card swelling, warping and separating in the ambience of
the inside out retail environment. The papery darkness was not seamless.
Carriage, pug, wafc, oppallery and altham orest rts allery clumsily signified some purpose to the imperfect
isolation of the gallery interior. They were intended to elicit a rational conjecture that
something could be happening behind the inky fibrous membrane. Doesn’t nature
abhor a vacuum? If nothing was happening inside surely would not the gallery
have been crushed in on itself by the force of omnipotent abhorrence? Perhaps,
in the minds of some passersby, that collapse is precisely what had become of
the gallery as a misappropriated retail opportunity. Was the whole installation
exterior an excessively daubed sign, so much so the paper/glass was over saturated
and so any significance was erased by the technically flawed pitch? I tried to sell
darkness that was so obviously not.
While
lining the gallery interior with the flimsy sheets I compared myself fancifully
to artists who have occupied the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern. Would and
could I even scrape the surface of the apotheosis of installed darkness as
conjured by Miroslaw Balka, or caste a box as eloquently, numerously and as
numinous as those of Rachel Whiteread? No! Not a pin prick of that hope for darkness and gravitas existed in
the brightest most intense reaches of my arch art fantasy.
Carriage
was and is an exploration of the nature of collective memory, specifically the
history of a retail space. I contrived a ritual by which to venture into the
historical material; for the private view, a period of one and
a half hours on 31st May 2012, visitors could only enter the interior
space alone. From the moment Carriage was accomplished it literally carried only one passenger at any time. What sort of collective coherency could
be achieved by that condition? The exploration of Carriage as a performance
ended at c. 7.50pm on 31st May 2012, when 3 persons entered the
space and closed the gallery door behind them.
As
Field Study’s Man in E17, I presented a digital video short of one of the
private visits to Carriage; my own and thus I think I have violated the privacy
less. It is necessary for artists to try and separate themselves from the
knowing of their work and to try and lose or find themselves in the points of
views of unknowing others; to maintain unfamiliarity. The creative territory of
the art is the space between the what, why and how of knowing and not knowing.
A tool for illuminating the threshold can be the question, ‘What if...?’
I
know I installed a playback/audio-recording in Carriage, of the meeting
held at the market on 13th December 2011. To truly enter the space
as an art work requires an effort; some imaginative energy to forget that and
ask what if it were something else. What is making it something else and
challenging the received notion of it? This may be an imperative for the author
of a work however it might equally apply to another entering into it. That 46
minute recording was a historical
document predominantly featuring the oratory of Jay Gort as he set out to
promote Wood Street Indoor Market’s place in the regeneration of Wood Street
via ‘Inside Out’ and the Outer London Fund. By May 2012 how had Wood Street Indoor Market
stayed the same and how was it different?
In
the course of the ritualised private views the reception of that 46 minute
historical continuity can only be assumed. I will tell an untruth by saying the
opening and closing of the door acted as a switch turning on and turning off
the playback. If the door wasn’t a switch there would be another problem to
solve in terms of retrieving some coherent historical consciousness; playback gaps as well as listening gaps.
The
digital video excerpt belies the poor quality of darkness achieved within Carriage.
The darkness lacked profundity and more so in the case of my ‘unprivate’
viewing which was polluting due to frivolous play with a torch. In between the
‘frivols’, authentic light seeped in via all manner of oversights,
underestimations, assumptions and ineptitudes. The result was a more
crepuscular than opaque interior. It was as if in the wishfully thought
darkness of this ‘spaceshop’ my eyes were black holes drawing in
slits and pricks of uninvited light.
Ghosts of Wood St Indoor Market past spoke with the orbiting ghosts of
Wood St Indoor Market present. It is strange that to ‘overlook’ is not to
see/notice, but to ‘overhear’ is to hear/notice even if secretly or accidently.
Some of the challenges to the knowing of the installation are the possibilities
of in-authenticity and the assumptions implicit in them. How could I discern the
voices and other sounds of the visually obscured past and present? Were there
murmurs, whispers and shuffles from the present that segued into the past as if
that is where they truly belonged and vice (and voice) versa? Could that have
been the liminality of Carriage; the past and present being indeterminate
within the context of discrete ritualised private views that collectively
expressed solidarity, by the artists, the arts club, the market and
others less apparent?
Was
the principle voice that of a ghost of indoor market futures eternally trying to convince people from the depths of the other darkness’s to come? Was it a muffled voice from a rarely to be opened cupboard or
draw, a susurration from a futuristic ventilation duct, a replicant mousey pitter-patter
from a crumbled cavity wall, a viral click from an obsolete but still very
collectable memory stick? I thought of the voice(s) as signals or transmissions
which will never stop travelling so long as there is space of some sort (a dark
carriage perhaps) and, in so doing, they will continually make history
as they never arrive anywhere and the destinations are always to be confirmed. Are we
there yet?
When
I emerged from my bunkum and bilge laden ponderosity I found myself in the
domain of the Archipelago of Truth, placed between the warsistic and the warsisistic. The possibility of new departures in pursuit of other convincing shades of outer London fun, past and present, presented itself. Of course, if I found a shade I would need a box
to put it in, as proof evident, except that there is the paradoxical problem of having to open the box and Field Study's Man in E17 wants to avoid having to be convincing.
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