Commentaries on My Artwork 1978 - 2000
‘Blazing a Trail’, which I made whilst still at art school in Brighton in early ’78, incorporates the theme of the road, which I have often used since.
I also started to get interested in heavy machines and steel.
The use of the machines and roads as metaphors are very convenient. Because machine can always travel up new roads, you see.
Until sometime later, when the roads meet. The collect point.
The place, like in life, where you have a natural pause for no other reason but the need to dream.
Pieces like ‘Bus Stop’ fit this, in early ’78.
It was stop I used to wait after college. And opposite it was a framework of large steel building which was being erected. I photographed it in stages, and used it as blueprint for my ‘79 artwork ‘Sky Frame’.
In ’78 I also formed a Punk Country band in England call The Sunset Boys. Infamous for being so bad, it sort of became good again.
We were the only Punk Country band at the time.
It was something I was doing at weekends. ‘Get some musicians together and make a band’. Everyone was doing it then.
It was good, this philosophy of re-inventing yourself according to your own imagination, and not someone else’s. It sort of leaked into my visual art practice.
I did a college summer job in ‘78, working as a trucker out of New York City. I also showed the audio-visual ‘Bus Stop’ piece for the first time, at The Performing Garage in New York.
It was a computerised installation made up of a sequence of slides and sound bite of traffic and people, abstracted through the wall of the frosted glass Brighton bus shelter..
It was like the thing so obvious in front of your eyes. Until taken out of context. Like ‘Sky Frame’ a year later in London.
In New York that summer I also quickly met a bassist and drummer, and formed a new wave punk band for a gig at the New York club CBGB’s.
- Battersea Park
After art college, late ’79 I moved to London and got the permission to make the 38 ton ‘Sky Frame’ artwork in Battersea Park from the then Mayor of London Ken Livingstone, who at that time was in control of Battersea Park.
He seemed amused by the apparent bravado. He was himself a born provocateur. This was a parallel to ‘Bus Stop’, the idea of transplanting something mundane into another environment as an artwork.
Later in 1980 I moved to Hamburg in Germany.
I showed ‘Bus Stop’ in a gallery there, and somebody wrote about it. So it came to the attention of Uli Krempel at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf.
He invited me to show as part of series of new media work, including the work of Nam June Paik.
I put together ‘Bus Stop’ again, and then in an adjacent space, a new series called ‘Containers’.
The containers, which I had photographed in Hamburg harbour, were projected onto the museum walls in various combinations, redrawing the space in the process.
I had first got interested in shipping containers whilst working for the Global Trucking Company in New York, as a trucker summer of ’78. Working as a loader and occasionally co-driver of 18 wheel trucks, picking up containers and moving them around the state of New York.
I guess I got into the whole process of containerisation; the cranes to pick them off the ships onto trucks and the transhipping and offloading.
Seemed a good metaphor for the interconnected global world we live in.
I also put together a multi-media performance, for the Kunsthalle opening, of myself performing with the German punk rock band, The Dead Trousers.
Andy Warhol showed up up at my opening and the performance, because he was also in Düsseldorf showing elsewhere in the city at the time.
After, he told me that my performance with the Trousers, against a backdrop of provocative projected slide images, reminded him of his own experiments with the rock band The Velvet Underground in New York.
In ’81 I moved onto a houseboat in on the Thames at Chelsea, after seeing an advert in the newspaper. I had always been drawn to water, since a child in Sussex.
From there, I then literally moved from barge to barge, and wharf to wharf, on Chelsea Reach of the River Thames, converting different barges to what I then needed; home, workshop, studio, store, archive, etc etc.
I made a lot of pieces nearby at Sands End, near The World’s End Chelsea. Which before they built Chelsea Harbour there, was half derelict and half metal breakers’ yard. Odd things like aircraft would turn up there to be dismembered.
I made a lot of performance and installation pieces there, including the ‘Dieselbird’ series, ‘Nude on the Conveyor’ and ‘Little Perfect Dream’ etc. I also collected a lot of objects, such as the large caterpillar track, which I later used in my ‘89 installation ‘Petroleum’.
It was trying to find harmonies. The old art, life and technology inter-relationship business.
If you like, converting or building a boat has always been about somehow trying to artfully design a technological object, that can work in union with nature.
By ’84, I had moved alongside a steel stock-holders and crane hire wharf, on the south side of Thames Chelsea Reach overlooking Albert Bridge.
I was surrounded there by heavy machinery and steel, I was allowed to play with. Meanwhile, part of the same time, I was experimenting with increasingly computerised audio visual technology and film, for the Canadian government and others.
Total contrast.
They were very visual productions, showing off Canada for the Canadian government for media use. And productions I made for American Airlines in Dallas, Mercedes Benz in Scotland, and bizarrely, even one for the Soviet Government’s shipping agency.
All this meant that my day to day life was full of extremes; one day in the studio making artworks; next at Canada House commissioning films; and next unloading a shipment of steel plate with a 22RB crane on caterpillar tracks.
The advantages were many-fold.
I had a yard and cranes to convert my growing collection of ever larger Thames barges; making artworks and installation for the inside of them; and the means with which to purchase ever sophisticated equipment and good art materials.
The commissions influenced my artwork, and vice versa.
My existing productions like ‘Bus Stop’ etc, meant that I was ahead in the use of tape-slide technology at the time, thus creating a marketable ability to work on commercial productions.
And the commissions introduced me to broader politics and other media like film. And financed my independence as an artist.
I started to make much more complex computerised multi-projector performance pieces around this time, first of which I showed at Donmar Warehouse in London in ’85.
Bits of this show were then cannibalised into my ‘Heavyweight’ installation at London’s Camerawork Gallery, in ’88. And eventually into ‘Endless Conveyor’ at the Museum of Installation, in London in ‘91.
The great thing about discovering a way to live on the river is the way it can grow organically, which a house rarely can. And certainly can’t move.
It gave me loads of space right where I wanted to be, in nature but in the city, and with lots of materials and sculptural resources alongside the river.
It got me really involved with heavy technology, and put me back closer to nature at the same time. I enjoyed this as I had grown up in rural Sussex.
This being on the river pushed all sorts of things my way. It’s ironic.
For example, I’ve watched all this decay of heavy industry alongside the river, which started all sorts of strands of ideas in my work. Whilst at the same time this dereliction released all the materials, objects and river vessels that became my collection on Chelsea Beach.
It was the period when old heavy technology started to give way in pre-eminence to newer technologies and service industries.
In the eighties starting to think that objectivity, in your art, is somehow best achieved through your own personal experiences.
And I suppose using images close to hand from your own environment is one way of doing this.
Such as images of machine technology.
Technology is something most of us share in common. So what happens to you is also what happens to most other people.
Modern life is global and indivisible somewhere at it’s core.
I’m very ambivalent to technology. I love it, and then I don’t. I’m even ambivalent about the sorts of technology I like.
In my studio-barge I seemed to balance the collection of more and more modern electronic tools at one end, with a growing collection of heavy industrial clutter at the other.
It is as though the gap between the two, was like the exponential gap that was opening up in the world outside. Between two utterly different technologies, and with us caught in the middle, and not controlling anything.
It’s odd really, our fascination for all these electronic gadgets, when for the most part, the technology we still rely on, is still rooted in the nineteenth century – such as the internal combustion engine.
It’s an historical process. The first industrial revolution expanded our physical muscle. Whilst the second industrial revolution, based on the computer chip, electronics and information, is expanding our mental muscle.
Unfortunately on the way, I believe, information is getting confused with the concept of ‘knowledge’. Which is about the physical ‘knowing’ of something for oneself.
Rather than derived third party information ‘about’ something.
If anything, mass media and new technology, is essentially pushing us into the arena where information and reality are in danger of becoming separated from matter itself.
So I am suspicious of technology. And business too, where it tries to control our life. And the part our own logic process is playing in all this.
Whilst you can’t deny that logic, and its implied power of organisation, has not been unimportant to us – it is also the same structure that has been driving us into tighter and remoter individual specialisations.
It makes it harder to see things as a whole – i.e. how or why things interact with one another. How or why most disciplines interact with one another. And whether this process is what we actually want, or need, as a species?
What happens to us could up being almost incidental?
It’s worth remembering, that it was universality, as a concept, that formed the original idea of the University.
In my studios I tend to end up making labyrinths of sketches and notes, that do, or do not, eventually bone together into a piece of work.
The ‘Distributor Archive’ idea of interchangeable barges and tugboat with complimentary functions, was a way of trying to work with matter in the same way I work out ideas on paper. I.e. making connections of sorts.
I also wanted to try and integrate my art-making process and life, as one whole. The idea, that if you can manage to somehow break down the barrier between art and life, there is half a chance that life itself can become a form of poetry.
I like to make situations that make connections.
Where ideas meet, where the roads meet, is where I get interested. Particularly if I can’t initially work out why I’m interested.
Wonder is, as often as not, part of the content of the arwork.
I don’t remember having set out to use photography so much. In fact I’m surprised how much photography I have used when I look back.
In way it’s not unnatural though, we live in an age where the camera is one of the common tools of our life.
We use it to second-guess the world we live. It collects time. Your time. The photograph. Responds to your sense of space.
My show ‘Petroleum’ in ’89 began oddly. I had a major dispute with the Shell oil company at the time, over the wash damage I was receiving to my barge collection by Albert Bridge from their 300 ton aviation fuel barges, passing me too fast every day on their way up river to Heathrow, with each incoming tide.
What interested me was their total indifference and inability to deal with me as an individual, and my complaints.
And their refusal to only play hard-ball power games.
They only played ball with me in the end, after I started following and filming their tankers going up the river from my motor launch. To demonstrate their reckless and unnecessary speed, causing my barges to bounce onto the foreshore as they came fleeted afloat with each tide.
‘Petroleum’ did not really deal with the dispute. It just inspired my interest in the subject of petroleum.
The piece was more of a private metaphor for us as the gas-guzzling ‘Hydrocarbon Species’, with our absurd dependence on the oil industry.
The world’s largest commercial operation. And it’s many parts.
The list is endless; oil, plastics, chemicals, pesticides, fertilizers; everything that is out of control.
What attracted me to the caterpillar track in ‘Petroleum’, was the idea of looking at the present as though it’s already a remnant of the past.
An intentional distortion of history. A different focus.
Actually the track itself had it made. Because it looks like the spinal column of something that once crawled around. Which of course is exactly what it is.
Excerpt from Petroleum The Performance
…. we are interested in affairs of the globe,
yesterday spun yarns on network television stations,
the absurdity of small electrical impulses shooting from continent to continent, continents speaking to one another as art itself
….. images make images, The Electricity of a Nation
The Election of a Nation through the eyes of satellite space rockets, speaking to economies rotten to the core
From Chicago to Vienna,The all-at-war broken-down network sky-horizon.... each link of the concept is dragged aboard, waiting for the release
as the anchor drops, to drag the bottom for more answers, the way down out into the hinterland of our imagination,
the dance route the sweet smell of the body in motion the beautiful-long-dieselbird; Dynamo
Installations that sing, and singing that warps your mind into long forgotten emotions.
The harmonics of art, life, and technology
In 1991, at the London Museum of Installation, I showed a piece called ‘Endless Conveyor’. This features the icon of a model’s face, in a multi-image projection, behind a conveyor that you travel on.
It hinted at the railroad of advertising and consumption. Being sold at, and buying as a result of.
I tended to work in two different sorts of ways in the ‘90’s: The real or imaginary travels.
Either I travelled in my tugboat with a barge in tow, to work on the continent. Where the boats themselves were vehicles for going and making artworks, making specific pieces in different cities. Or I left the city in the barge I lived on, and started making fictional charts on watercolour paper someplace at anchor up the East Coast of England.
They are imaginary travels – fictional charts.
For example these three charts were made in the River Crouch, which is the first river North of the River Thames. They were made at anchor, during a month, a few years ago. They tend to start from a spontaneous viewpoint.
This one, Island Sand Bars Chart, was very much a reaction to the habitat up there. When you’re travelling by boat you’re surrounded by shoals and banks and eddies. So you are reliant on the charts. These were all generally made in one day. I tend to
start in the morning. For example with Island Sand Bars Chart, the first process was to use a broom to put the wash across, in the morning. Then after lunch the pigment went on and then I sprayed the various colours over the top. It started by accident I threw one pigment onto the paper which, by accident, suggested islands. I then got in the dingy and rowed across to the village nearby to the car accessory shop, where I bought cans of Vauxhall Ford Nevada, Beige and China Blue, which I then sprayed on over paper masks.
What was the process for making the charts?
This is the kit that I have used for the making of all the charts. The wash behind these is a watercolour wash base. Then I use dry pigments a lot. These are put on with various tools; sieves, blown on and then hoovered up, etc. I use the car spray paints because they are very quick to use.
I like your story about this large metal cogwheel, and how it fitted into the making one of the charts.
This piece is much more related to South America, where I was travelling back in 1976.
This piece started when I was at anchor and was thinking about the Nasca Desert in Peru that I had been in. Then somebody came on-board with a radio. I hadn’t listened to the radio for about a month. I had literally decided to cut myself off, drop anchor and move in circles round the anchor with the tide down the East coast.
Something I like to do every 10 years or so. So, on the radio I heard a story about the tanks in Kuwait rolling across the desert at that time, so the piece slightly changed its whole direction. I rolled this huge cog across it after dipping it in paint. They are very loose pieces, they are things I tend to have a lot of fun with really.
Although they do tend to pull together a lot of the elements of my life; geography, travel.
The curious thing on the Continent, in the museum shows, was the way the public responded to the charts. A lot of people were very drawn into them and this was a very curious thing for me. It said a lot about the sort of suspicions that some people have about art. That if you give them a single handle, they often lock in - the idea of a fictional chart is a very simple one, in other words, make up your own plot. That invitation to ‘make up your own plot’ is very much that way that I would teach an art course. Often when you are taught you have got to learn somebody else’s plot, whereas, really what you should be learning is how to make your own plot through artwork, in general.
Tell us about this table?
The table came later, it was actually made to go with the chart. This piece came out of one evening when I was sitting on the deck of the ship with about a dozen friends having a party at midnight. Someone pointed out that opposite us on the Crouch, there is a straight sea wall, which is about ten miles long, and that if you just put your head up gently to the starts and bring your eyes down, you could sense the curvature of the earth, by the horizontal curve of the wall. You are very rarely at that sort of vantage point on land with a straight line in front of you. However, the earth is dropping off a few feet per mile, which is enough to see the curve. The reason that
you need to look down and try to sense it is because automatically your eyes try to correct it, and thinks it straight, but there was a clear curve there.
What I found interesting was the idea of actually being able to sense you were standing on something that was spherical. That everything else is dropping away from you. We know that - it is one of the first things that we are told as a child - but to actually sense it is a totally different thing. It made me start to think a lot about the way that we are actually on our own point, as the ship was, literally.
The two co-ordinates of that point, for each of us, is a point in space and a point in time. It is the same for every animal. Those are our twin co-ordinates.
I have become very interested in the idea of tracking, and that we are perpetually tracking things in our own lives and around us - and that we are the accident of where paths cross usually, even in our thinking.
I made The Plotting Table to go with the Stellar Chart. Then this bizarre thing happened, once I had made it, because the edge of the table was ground off, and when I came back in the morning all the metal filings had somehow attracted themselves to the tip of the metal pointer. It was as if there was some kind of alchemy at work that I didn’t understand. The piece really in a way was about some sort of fictional concentration of energies, you know everything sort of comes down to that point - but that it had actually happened was a very bizarre twist on the whole piece.
This is a 1994 piece that is much more archaeological – History of the World in Four Parts. This piece has been making itself for about ten years. Inside this there are a number of heavy objects that are buried in plaster. Most of them are close to the surface and they slowly rust through. There is a big chain in this one and other objects. Possibly in about another ten years more will come through. The ambient atmosphere seems to keep the process going. There are other objects such as a pulley wheel assembly inside.
How does this come out in your own process of working?
I tend to end up making labyrinths of sketches and notes, that do, or do not, eventually bone together into a piece of work.
The ‘Distributor Archive’ idea of interchangeable barges and tugboat with complimentary functions, was a way of trying to work with matter in the same way I work out ideas on paper. I.e. making connections of sorts.
I also wanted to try and integrate my art-making process and life, as one whole. The idea, that if you can manage to somehow break down the barrier between art and life, there is half a chance that life itself can become a form of poetry.
I like to make situations that make connections.
Where ideas meet, where the roads meet, is where I get interested. Particularly if I can’t initially work out why I’m interested.
Art to me, is where wonder is as often as not, part of the content.
You appear as both a maker and collector of things, ideas and images.
I don’t remember having set out to use photography so much. In fact I’m surprised how much photography I have used when I look back.
In way it’s not unnatural though, we live in an age where the camera is one of the common tools of our life.
We use it to second-guess the world we live.
It collects time. Your time. The photograph. Responds to your sense of space.
Do you feel your iconography to be essentially private, or is there a search for more tangible, shared grounds?
Both. Or neither. It depends how I’m feeling.
Certainly one of the major links between people is their received imagery. Which includes everything from the landscape to media and published images.
My own satisfaction, is to find an image that fits me. But also by accident perhaps reflects a more general common sense perception of the world. Like the shipping containers. Back to archetypes.
My artworks are also my own private metaphors and emblems. Even the way I choose to see reality at times.
You have that choice.
At times I feel like the heavy machinery in my work is like the rumble of the world in my head, with electronics etched into the background. Like signposts
I live on the water in a major world city, and deal with what confronts me there. That includes nature, industry, trade and politics. My artistic genre partly comes out of this.
My Plot series of exhibitions and events, Northern Europe 1996 - 1997, deals with locations, and materials that link us.
It’s about the different thoughts and reactions that confronted me as an artist, when I worked and travelled in different cities, countries and locations.
And the totally different sense of perspective you get when you arrive by boat up rivers like The Rhine.
Arriving by boat automatically creates a different sense of fiction. You are aware, for instance, of the continuity of one situation to another, and what links them.
Nationality becomes very arbitrary. This concept is based on land, not water.
In water, you are literally in the medium that connects most nations to one another. The interesting question for me is what connects us all?
Certain materials for a start.
Hence the subtitle of The Plot; Water, Petroleum, Steel and Mud.
Rudder, Performance for a Tug, a Port, and a Museum
Quayside in front of the Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp (MUHKA) 1996
With the University of Antwerp (RUCA), the City of Antwerp, MUHKA, Studio Herman Teirlinck acting academy, and the Port of Antwerp
The performance took place at night in November and consisted of the tugboat pulled out of the water, nine dancers and semaphorists, four television actors and one professor as speakers, and a soundtrack.
The speakers engaged in a debate in English, Dutch, German, French, and Latin. They assumed the roles of four archetypes based around the historical figures of Erasmus, Descartes, Kant, and Henry Ford. Each archetype and text represented four historical areas of influence on the present. These were ethics, philosophy, science, and business.
The dancers performed over a large area of the quayside. Their body language interpreted the texts and assisted with the communication between the different languages. The overall performance was directed by myself from the wheel of his tugboat by turning the rudder, which had two powerful spotlights attached to it.
Around the venue was a quadraphonic soundtrack of layered mechanical sounds constructed from the noises of the boat’s machinery. On the roof of the museum was a semaphorist, who was communicating by flags with another semaphorist on the ground. Additional ambience was created by the movement of lights and sounds from ships in the port behind and a dramatic atmosphere of driving wind.
This artwork dealt with questions of communication and history combined with the idea of involving a variety of one city’s institutions in a single event. It was conceived from a simple analogy: that society is steered from behind by history in the same way that a boat is steered by its rudder.
The event had grown from a collaboration between myself, an artist interested in structures and mechanisms, and Emile Vanlommel, a university vice-chancellor and economist interested in art. Our joint aim was partly a perpetuation of the concept of the university as a place in which ideas can connect in universality and polarity to one another. The collaboration, which grew into a further association with other professors and staff of the university and a free interpretation with dancers and the sound artist Ward Weis, was an organic process. It eventually led to an artwork in which the academic ideas were tempered by the unexpected broader poetry of the final event.
The specific pieces, Drop Steel that I made for The Lehmbruck Museum, European Centre for Modern Sculpture in Duisburg, and then The Steel Fulcrum for the city of Düsseldorf, were all about steel.
I had even arrived in Duisburg in early ’97 with my tugboat and barge, inside a massive Rhine steel ore barge.
An exhibition of my works occupied part of the Lehmbruck Museum in ‘97.
The museum then arranged for me to retrieve a large set of very heavy steel objects from Ruhr metal yards. And a crane from which to drop them at reasonable height on one steel plate at a time. Thus making an imprint of them.
This was called Drop Steel.
It was about invention, manufacture, progress, and the whole influence that working in steel has had as an historical motor. To the Ruhr itself also, where the stamping and forging of objects in steel had gone on for generations.
The Steel Fulcrum took place, soon after in Düsseldorf, where the 30 ton barge I had towed from London was balanced out of water on a specially built steel fulcrum, at the point of balance amidships.
The public was then invited to climb inside, and their body weight animate the entire assemblage.
Fulcrum was about the relationship we have, as humans, with things of technological mass, that we try to come to terms with.
It was in many ways a literal metaphor of being able to control the mass of a huge object of our own invention.
This piece is the central piece, or has become one of the central piece of my life, by accident. This was made finally in Dusseldorf, Germany, where I balanced a barge on a steel fulcrum. The piece is called The Steel Fulcrum. It is about the point of fulcrum.
The barge sat on top of the steel fulcrum, which was a very large spring originally from Fulham Power Station. A set of which the main turbine used to sit on.
The action of the public inside the barge, walking either way, tilted the whole piece. What happened, by accident, was that this piece was so much trouble to make and it caused a political row in Germany. The Duisburg harbour authorities who didn’t know what to do with it when it arrived. Firstly they commissioned the project but when it arrived they decided that it might not pass their health and safety regulations. They thought that everybody who went inside was going to get killed.
We ended up in this row where the city and the museum were being pushed around by the corporation in the harbour who were supposed to put it together but were finding every reason not to. It became a conflict between the corporation, the museum and the people who were trying to make it.
The complete accident that happened, that came out of the making of the piece, rather than the ideas put into it, was that the piece itself was a perfect metaphor for the process that was happening there in the city.
The piece itself is about finding a balance between conflicting forces. The way that you can shift the balance by everybody going in the same direction, or not. This became a very political piece, which I ended up using in an exhibition at the European Parliament in ‘98. The Lehmbruck Museum exhibition was accompanied by a series of lectures and a performance called The European Business Conference.
It was obviously about what happens when business gets in the way of art. Except no one got that in Duisburg at the time. .
Tug Print A Contemporary Archaeology
It began on the east coast, the tug sat in 5ft of mud and left its in-print behind – like a sort of instant archaeology. It made me think about machines, as a part of nature, reproducing themselves in competition with us. It’s not true of course but we often feel it is.
Then the next stage was convincing someone else that I was serious about it. This model was made for the Director of the Sprengel Museum, for the project, which he
kept on his desk. Which resulted in the final installation for the museum in Hanover in ‘97. You can see the whole process here from the throwaway sketch to completion, which took about six years.
At the end of July, 1997, my tugboat was lifted out by harbour crane at Hanover’s Lindener Harbour and transported by road into the Sprengel Museum, where it was dropped from five metres into a mound of 100 tons of Hanover clay and sand. It was then removed to leave behind the imprint of its underbelly: the Tug Print.
The tug then returned to London, whilst the Tug Print remained in situ, slowly cracking up.
This was an artwork that had developed in three quite separate ways. First an original accidental imprint had been made some years earlier in a muddy creek of the east coast of England. Then there was the spectacle and performance of making the print in the museum, broadcast on international television. And finally there was the aftermath, in which the print had become a silent part of the museum’s collection
– begging the question of the visitor of what had made it – obvious only that it must have come from above.
The final installation, devoid of the boat, had resonances of archaic ceremony and monument-making — of burial or fertility — centred on the imprint of the belly of a petroleum powered machine. It was a deliberate distortion, a way of looking at the present as though it was already a trace from the distant past.
How does your art adapt?
I guess that one of the good things about being an artist is that no one can tell you what you should be doing, you can change direction when you like and take clues from anything and everything.
What has become apparent to me over the past fifteen odd years is that art is so often what happens to you. If you sit in the valley and there’s a beautiful view, then that’s what you paint. If you suddenly get politics and business and all of these things attempting to play with your work, then it inevitably becomes part of your work. I think Christo found the same thing. The political process of making the pieces is as much part of the work as the pieces themselves.
The Couper Collection exhibited artwork and installations, created at this site onboard a fleet of specially converted Thames barges over three decades. The Collection was run as public trust, in association with Wandsworth Council. The trust's programme included live events, new artists' exhibitions, discussions, educational collaborations, and ecology.
This piece is called ‘Split Track’, 1998, which is basically a steel track set into plaster. The biggest challenge of the building of this was the engineering of it
because it is very heavy. Engineering it in such a way that you could open and close it because it is so very heavy. The way it works is that the weights enable it to be lifted but then if you let it down it could smash down without the weights. So the weights work both ways.
This 1998 piece is called ‘Shutter’. I kept this one because it has a personal ring to it because the Container is the object which has made my entire life possible. It was the invention of the container, this system of putting everything in boxes, that created the entire redundancy of everything on this river. When containerisation came along in the 1970’s no one needed barges or tugs or wharf’s. Basically the container ships are too big to come up the Thames and stick to the coast. So, thank you very much containers.
Hanging Object Archive 1998. There are lots of objects here. This group of stuff in here just started. There was an old hardware shop in Soho where I used to buy things. It was the last hardware store where they hung everything from the ceiling. Basically, 50 years ago most hardware stores used to do that. It just seemed a good way of using this space. I started collecting objects in here, but eventually I think I’ll leave it as it is. It’s almost like they have created their own vocabulary. It’s like letters, when you juxtapose one letter with another you get a word, the same sort of process is happening here for me. This curious thing where you put a number of objects together and a story arrives, which is accidental. This idea of collecting objects and creating a story or a fictional history.
The Shrinking Beach was a multcultural citizens’ jury, political artwork, and millennium portrait. It was created in collaboration with the Secretary General of Amnesty International Pierre Sane, Dean Leslie, Canon Ivor Smith-Cameron, Kamel Samari and Carole Tongue. It was located incognito one September afternoon at low tide on the Chelesa Beach of the tidal River Thames. The beach was chosen as an international place of common ground, where participants from a variety of background and cultures could meet and agree on issues of land-ownership and development, human-rights, and the environment. They had only a couple of hours to reach an agreement before the table they were seated around was flooded by the incoming tide. This was intended to emphasize respect for the forces of nature, and remind the participants that time may be running out in the search for agreement on certain global issues.
The participants were invited as archetypes and citizens of international society, representing the interests of one of four areas; government, non-governmental organisations, business, and the individual. All persons invited felt able to attend the event, apart from the invitees of the multinational corporations who consequently marginalised themselves from the discussion and agreement.
My intention was to make a political artwork and portrait reflecting an increasingly multicultural and global contemporary society . My proposition is that people from different parts of society should occasionally meet in a place of neutrality when discussing matters of common interest. This event followed two recent political artworks and exhibitions I created at The Lehmbruck Museum in Duisburg, Germany, in 1997, and at The European Parliament in Brussels, Belgium, in 1998.
Attendees; Carole Tongue (Rapporteur of the discussion), 15 years MEP for London East, and European Parliament Culture Spokesperson. Dean Leslie, New York businessman and international lawyer. Tom Butler, Anglican Bishop of Southwark, London. Nina Simoas, Brazilian land-rights activist and campaigner.
Reverend Bhikkhu Nagasi, Japanese Buddhist Monk, and custodian of the Battersea Park Peace Pagoda overlooking the event. Baroness Angela Billingham, Member of The House of Lords, London, and Justice of the Peace. Sir Hugh Beach, British Army general, authority on nuclear disarmament, and owner of 15,000 acres of Derbyshire moorland. Canon Ivor Smith-Cameron (Chair of the Discussion), First Asian Chaplain to Her Majesty The Queen, born in Madras, India. Pierre Sane, First black Secretary General of Amnesty International, based in London and born in Senegal, Africa. Max Couper, Anglo-Italian Thames-based artist and mariner, supporter of London river-dwellers rights versus the enchroachment of multi-national corporations. Kamel Samari, First Tunisian political refugee in Britain, senior Amnesty International co-ordinator, London. David Hencke, London investigative jounalist and parliamentary political correspondant. John Vidal, Environment Editor of The Guardian Newspaper, London. Paul Boateng (Pre-discussion collaborator),
U.K. Deputy Home Secretary and first black British Minister of State. Born in Ghana, Africa.
Non-attendees; Percy Barnevik, Chairman of ABB Ltd, Swedish/Swiss multinational company building dams and power-plants in developing countries. David Sutherland, former head of GATT, chairman of Goldman Sachs International. David Varney, Chief Executive of British Gas. David Lunn, of British mulinational Nestle. Richard O’Brian, European Head of Global Business Network, members including; Shell, B.P., Exxon, Glaxo, Welcome, Monsanto, I.C.L., B.T., Cable and Wireless, Nat West Bank, City Bank, Deutsche Bank, Morgan Stanley, General Motors, Ford, and Nissan.
With the support of Mo Mowlam, Secretary of State, London.
A Contemporary Opera and Ballet for Public and Parliament on the River Thames July 2000.
Created with Trevor Wishart, Sasha Kingston & Tom Sapsford
Featuring The Royal Opera, The Royal Ballet, The Orchestra of The Royal Opera House, Deborah Bull and Judi Dench.
Fleeting Opera, episode one ‘Birthrite’, was a contemporary floating opera and ballet created for The River Thames with my collaborators; composer Trevor Wishart, textile artist Sasha Kingston and Royal Ballet choreographer Tom Sapsford.
This Fleeting Opera, London’s first opera on the Thames, was performed on two consecutive nights of July 2000, first for public audiences alongside Battersea Park, and then for audiences by Lambeth and for members on the terraces of The Houses of Parliament. The opera was towed into the incoming evening tide by myself in my tug Pablo, with the audience watching whilst walking slowly along the riverbank with the boats.
This ritualistic opera and ballet centred on a matriarchal pregnant soprano and two male singers of The Royal Opera, two dancers of The Royal Ballet, three musicians from The Orchestra of The Royal Opera House, and actress Judi Dench. They
performed to the audience from two separate moving barges with an onboard sound and light system. It was delivered in fleeting sequences and based around a computer generated soundtrack overlaid with live voice and instrumentation. The singers performed in different metres to one another in an invented language, a trumpeter, violinist and double bass player accompanied them, Judi Dench delivered a metred prose in English, whilst the dancers interacted and interpreted. There were two winch-men of great strength that handled the barges whilst they were under tow. They alternately pull them together or release them, according to the interaction of the performers to one another.
Water is the element that brings things from the land into contact with one another. I have worked as an artist from my studio-barges for twenty years. It was the water that had brought my mother’s ancestors to England from Florence in Italy in the 1800’s, and the water that had sustained them once they arrived, as bridge-builders and stevedores. It was from this Italian side of the family that I inherited the sense that opera that should always be open to re-invention, and not just a static classical art form.
The first impulse to this opera was the idea of continuous motion, of things in flux.
The title Fleeting Opera tied these things together. It combined the word ‘fleeting’, the ancient Thames word describing when a barge floats up on the tide, with the sense of the temporal and passing. Being fleeting opera meant it did not have to relate to land opera, which freed the idea of creating a new genre of sorts.
I avoided working with narrative, or anything which required viewing from beginning to end, and decided to explore ritual instead. This provided an open-ended vehicle, which allowed the spectator to view the work in passing and fleeting abstracted passages. The electronic backing-track, constructed on computer from sounds by Trevor Wishart, gave a sculptural feel to the overall piece, and provided a basic cue structure for the dancers and performers to work within. Constructing the vocal passages in different metres to one another added a certain element of chance into the interpretation of the score. This created a polyrhythmic structure where the singers and musicians locked together harmonically in shifting accents. Another example of this sort of structure can be found in the chanting of traditional Balinese Ketchak music. The invented language and costumes reflected a fictional culture fused from many places over the seas. The fabric blazons of metalised silk suspended from the rigging created the set, that served to locate the piece within the river. This and the amplified sound and lighting that carried the piece to the shoreline, had to be of large scale to fit the size of the river.
To me, what makes an event an opera or simply a performance, is whether it revolves around passion and a sense of the absurd or not. Rivers have always been associated with the idea of fertility and renewal, so sexuality was implicit in the piece right from the start. This fitted my basic operatic idea of attraction and repellance between the opposite sexes, and the two barges, in the opera. The pregnant matriarch at the centre of the opera provided a simple image of fertility which the performers and audience were naturally drawn towards. There was an irony in performing the opera to Parliament, our modern day court, and in the introduction of the spoken word. This brought the piece by accident back to the origins of early opera itself, as well as fusing a lot of elements including ballet and theatre. Opera was born in Italy out of the combination of spectacle and music performed for the court, with experiments to revive the use of speech, as they had imagined it in ancient Greek theatre.
In the opera itself, the event polarised around the chemistry between three extraordinary women; the dancer Deborah Bull, the actress Judi Dench and the soprano Kate McCarney. The perception of an elegant matriarchy at play, in the end proved overwhelming.
The tide of the river flowing in was the life at the heart of the opera, the returning force of renewal. Throughout there was a continuous struggle going on, of the winch- men pulling the barges together and apart against the force of the tide and the screw of the tugboat. All of these activities were being marshalled and controlled by a production crew deep inside one barge and invisible to the audience. Inside the other barge was a mass of sound equipment and engineers being co-ordinated by Trevor Wishart, whose only contact with the performance was through headphones. Ahead in the tugboat I had the delicate task of keeping the barges from snaking about too much and at the right distance from the audience on the bank, whilst directing events.
The opera was dominated both evenings by an unusually vivid summer’s sky. It veered from a turquoise blue early on, to cobalt blue as the night deepened. My
over-riding memory is of the orange silk of the performers’ garments against the blue of the sky, combined with the motion of dancers, and a soundscape echoing from the barges all around the river. Finally arriving at Parliament seemed like the most bizarre of historical time-warps - aware that this was the first waterborne pageant to have arrived there since the middle ages.
The function of the dance was to be a seduction and animation between the boats; linking the singers, the musicians and the sound-track into an interactive whole. The whole fleeting opera becoming a vehicle of movement, light and sound transmitted over the water, with the dance as the dynamic drive element. The boats were moving, the water was flowing under them, and the audience was walking alongside
– creating motion upon motion upon motion, and medium upon medium upon medium. The seduction of the dance was an intensely erotic one, which focused the attention of the viewer despite the huge scale of the surroundings. The set flying from the masts served to focus the eye on the performers.
There was much stealth in the movement of the performers, and each one created in his or her own imagination a figment of what this event meant to them. In reality, the sheer fact of a stage in motion, affected by tide, wind and tow, created a respect for the natural elements that could not have been duplicated in a rehearsal on dry land.
The central figure was the pregnant matriarch Angelica. She was the dominant figure of respect to whom everyone performed. Her fertility and ability to reproduce life was the source of her ability to attract the other performers to her. She had her own personal assistants that followed her everywhere; including a lady trumpet player, who complimented her own musical virtuosity, and her storyteller, the actress Judi Dench in her first operatic performance. For her I wrote a form of metred narrative, locating the piece in its setting.