WAY FROM THE LIGHT Written by Dr Alan Bleakley
Shed’ – a site-specific installation by the PALP (Penwith Artist Led Project) group of visual artists, Boscathnoe Farm, Heamoor, Penzance, Cornwall, 11-13 August 2000.
Despite the presence of a major art school in Falmouth , there is a peculiar, obstinate denial of contemporary art in West Penwith . The peninsula is home to a significant slice of Modernist experimentation that now can best be described as ‘oedipal’ art – tamed, socialized, homogenized, decorative, often insipid. Yet the galleries are full of this stuff, inspired by the ‘quality of light’ of the peninsula. The art-in-safe-hands school regularly scorns what might be called ‘anti-oedipal’ art (explicitly transgressive, destabilizing normalised form and idea) for what the anti-oedipalists might see as ‘tourist art’. But the modernist-traditionalists should be reminded of Gustave Flaubert’s acid comment on the imagination: ‘When you lack it, attack it in others.’
Disillusioned by the knee-jerk response to West Penwith that seems to bring out the Modernist in us through representation of sea and light, an adventurous group of visual artists has turned its collective back on the shimmering sea and gone to ground, to the peninsula’s agricultural interior. In a return to the farm, they have appropriated its most disreputable buildings – the shed (donkey shed, tool shed, garden shed, coal shed), the outhouse, the disused lean-to – and inhabited them and infected them with their work and imagination. In this turn, the reflected light of the sea is replaced by a variety of interior shed-lights illuminating objects and ideas stimulated by the presence of the sheds and readily dissolving any artificial boundary between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’.
Penwith Artist Led Project (PALP) is a collective of inspired and insightful artists who want to see community action as arts-led, not economy- or politics-led, in an area of the country historically famous for its art but in decline in relation to recent movements in the art world. PALP’s manifesto focuses upon ‘workspace issues and support structures for visual artists in Penwith’, but also expresses a wish to link with other artists and collectives in the UK and Europe who might ‘find new ways of working together in different spaces and places to reach new audiences.’ Shed is the first in a series of site-specific shows aiming to meet these goals, and offers installations inspired by a variety of dwellings and spaces (‘sheds’) in the extensive and wonderful gardens of two Penzance-based doctors, Jane and Neil Armstrong.
Heidegger’s 1951 essay ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’ asks how humans can dwell, or inhabit spaces, ‘poetically’. Heidegger does not address building architecturally, but traces building back to two questions: 1). What is it to dwell? 2). How does building belong to dwelling? We only dwell, says Heidegger, by means of building. Dwelling is the goal of building.
Sheds are unique in that we build them for the dwelling of others – livestock, tools, plants, wood and coal. Yet we also dwell in them because of the enticing presence of these others. Everybody knows the wonder of the peaty smell of the garden shed, the allotment shed, or the rich manure and straw smell of the animal shed. In these dwellings we do not dwell on ourselves (the limited horizon of introspective and autobiographical art), but dwell in the presence of the tool and its maintenance, the donkey and its droppings and mucking out, the coal and its shifting, the plant and its tending, the abandoned paraphernalia of the farmyard and its hoarding. Children inhabit these places through games that make such dwellings ‘camps’ (inviting us for a while to go ‘wild’ or ‘native’, to be anti-oedipal, anti-family values), places of retreat, secrecy, initiation, experimentation and exploration, immune from adult interference.
Heidegger’s insight draws us away from the things of the world to the business of being with those things, again, tending or extending, cleaning, shifting, dumping. He raises the question: how do we dwell with that which is not us? How do we ‘live’ the building itself, beyond the function of shed as mere shelter or storage? This is to give dwelling character. In a site-specific project, such as that of PALP’s Shed, the indwelling of a variety of outhouses is given character through elaboration and supplement. Oddly, in such a rural, earthy setting, the show adopts a baroque method: by adding to, extending, convoluting and involuting, by folding the thing upon itself to increase surface, a whole new meaning is derived. For audiences raised on Penwith’s tourist ceramics, seascapes and interminable modernist abstractions capturing ‘the quality of light’, this presents a darker challenge. Each shed in the show is explicitly ‘worked’, re-inhabited, dwelt upon as a space and space, as location, and then in-dwelt in inspiration. It is as if a previously hidden fold in the shed’s character has been unfolded for inspection, demanding a new interest and a different eye.
Artists are prone to claim a kind of child-like innocence about their work, resisting a theorizing: ‘it’s just what it is’, or ‘I just made it’. But this is not the case with a site-specific installation that demands a response to a space and place. Besides, each artist is embedded in a moving stream of historical ideas, images and languages of articulation that dictate to them and is bigger than each individual. Taking the shed as a theme already raises a language from the earth, to which each artist must respond not just aesthetically but ethically. Each has a responsibility to respond to ‘shed’ in its three meanings. First, as shelter or storage place, where it first entered the English language in the 15th century: ‘a slight structure built for shelter or storage, or for use as a workshop, either attached as a lean-to a permanent building or separate, often with open front or sides.’ (The Shorter OED). Second, as ‘to separate or divide’. In the 16th century, ‘shed’ also came to mean the ridge that separated two valleys, and the parting of the wool of sheep in order to grease their skins. By the 18th century this ‘parting’ came to include the parting of human hair, and ‘shed’ was used specifically to refer to the opening made between the threads of a warp in weaving. Third, is the meaning of ‘shed’ as to get rid of something: to shed a tear, to shed a burden, to lose or cast off. The silkworm sheds its cocoon; the evening sheds its light.
A shed also came to mean, by the 17th century, the hiding place or lair of an animal, an image used to great effect by Mary Shelley in Frankenstein. Who can forget those eerie scenes where Frankenstein’s anomalous ‘monster’, as yet unschooled, holes up in an abandoned shed and there, eavesdropping on the inhabitants of the cottage, terrified of being discovered and rejected as a wild animal, learns language, manners, emotional expression, or is civilized through ‘distance learning’? The ‘monster’s’ shed becomes both temporary dwelling and schoolroom for the indwelling of a culture. It is a familiar motif in literature – the hideaway, the humble and temporary dwelling, becomes the site of a great birth or an idiosyncratic education, from Jesus to Huckleberry Finn.
In The Ethical Function of Architecture, Karsten Harries (1998, p.174) raises the dilemma produced by a diasporic, postmodern world of identity distribution, and the loss of foundations and centres for multiple, relative meanings and the value of peripheries, so that there is nothing to build on but movement itself: ‘The more technology carries the attack on place into our everyday life, the more we can expect that life to be tinged by a sense of being on the road, of not belonging, of being denied the possibility of really dwelling somewehere.’ This may produce a ‘terror of space’ in the sense that the world is suddenly boundary-free. The shed is a liminal space and place that satisfies both the urge to wander (sheds are temporary and easily abandoned), and the urge to inhabit (sheds provide shelter). The shed is not a home but a ‘stopping-off’ dwelling, a temporary experience, as Frankenstein’s ‘monster’ discovers. Sheds are not made to last, they are ‘mobile’ by nature, constantly patched up, often abandoned, the work of the bricoleur rather than the architect-builder.
Bernard Tschumi (1996, p.31) reminds us that the modern idea of inhabited space can be summed up in the notion of ‘felt volume’, denoting a substantial space, and revealing a character. This returns us to the differentiation of a variety of ‘felt volumes’ of the shed: an animalised shed (the donkey shed), a carbonised shed (the coal shed), an instrumentalised shed (the tool shed, the tractor shed), a nurturing shed (the garden shed, the poly-tunnel). Surely there must be sheds that are also shelters for ideas (the workshed, the writing shed?) If museums are shelters for fossilised, grand ideas, then sheds are good shelters for temporary, liquid, effervescent, shifting ideas. Our third definition of ‘shed’ above was to leave, to abandon, to get rid of, to let go.
Dwellings ‘gather’ suggests Heidegger. But they gather in a paradoxical way. The Greeek paras means ‘boundary’ (‘parameter’), but does not indicate where something stops. Rather, it indicates the place from which something unfolds towards a horizon (a horizon of form as well as a horizon of meaning). Accordingly, a boundary setting, as a site-specific installation in a bordered garden, can offer an unfolding out from each piece of work, rather than an inward dwelling of each ‘shed’. Such an unfolding can be seen as an essaying of place and space in terms of a broadcast of the character of a locality. The installation then gives the locality form, voice and value, offering both an aesthetic and ethical response. Uprooted after only three days, the show dissipates into photographs and essay, as well as personal memory, as the migrant images move on to inhabit spaces other than sheds and places other than gardens.
References
Harries, K. (1998) The Ethical Function of Architecture . Cambridge , Mass. : The MIT Press.
Heidegger, M. (1978) ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’, in Basic Writings , ed. D. F. Krell, London : Routledge.
Tschumi, B. (1996) Architecture and Disjunction . Cambridge , Mass. : The MIT Press.
The work
Tessa Garland Prelude 2001
Gillian Cooper’s ‘Thicker than Water’, installed in a large, open-fronted shed using the floor space, has around seventy metal pails and half that number of brushes (scrubbing brushes and hairbrushes) perched on the pails, or abandoned on the floor. Some of the pails have tipped, all their contents have evaporated. The title suggests blood ties and family connections, and the objects invite classification into family groups, such as types of brushes. The work signifies domestic toil, and going into service.
Amanda Lorens’ ‘Bath’ transforms the archetypal abandoned bath one always finds outdoors on a Cornish farm by cladding it inside and out in white towelling. The clean and the dirty, bath and towel, become one, absorbing the elements during the three days’ of the show. Cleverly, the towelling stops at a tide line, so that the rusty base of the bath is left. Amanda’s ‘Coal Shed’ turns from the water and air of the bath to fire and earth. An electric fire sits atop a heap of coal in a bricked coal shed. A chair is placed in front of the fire. The small space is stiflingly hot. Disconcertingly, a vicious fire, like a building burning down, crackles and roars away through an installed tape-loop, creating a disorientating spontaneous combustion without real markers of flame and smoke.
Susan Bleakley lights up the corrugated-roofed donkey shed with small night-lights. It is as if it is Christmas in August, as we enter the cobble-floor stable in anticipation, to greet a strange amalgam of fairy story and postmodern superwoman. Here is the outfit of ‘Donkey Girl’ hanging from a beam. Above a pressed white dress with scrubbing brushes at knee height (donkey girls are working girls) is a pair of silver-grey donkey ears. A broom completely gilded with gold stands by the outfit, and at the foot of the broom is a small pile of gold-gilded donkey shit. Some transformation is happening. There is more gilded shit mingled with the real stuff in a heap topped by golden straw. It is a changing room for a super-heroine. In her ‘Plant Labels and Plants’, Sue infects small area of garden with vibrant, brightly-coloured plastic plants, described by ghastly names written on accompanying sticks of alabaster, such as ‘Mists of Malice’. This is the alternative garden centre, the future Eden .
In a three-piece suite, Tessa Garland also makes futuristic flowers. On a theme of surveillance, ‘Prelude’ is sited above the ‘shed’ that is the outdoor loo. It is a construction at giant’s height, accessible by ladder, into which you look to be greeted by an eye looking back. ‘Big Flower is watching You (Part 1)’ is reached by a trail through the garden, leading to the ‘shed’ that is a roomy plastic tunnel, a small hangar. Tendrils of red filler-foam have greeted you on your walk, and now you walk into a hothouse of red Amazonian flowers and overhanging vines. The flowers reach out with their finger-like petals, and at the centre of one is a surveillance camera. In ‘Part 2′ of the same piece, you are led away to a garden shed where a CCTV screen glows with the image of the watching flower. You see others watching the flower that is watching them while you watch, distanced, in a hothouse of surveillance and simulation.
Fergus Murray’s ‘The Drying Room’ is an alternative peepshow. At the entrance to a small shed you lift a cloth veil to reveal a room packed with hanging and drying forms, lit by a hurricane lamp. This could be tobacco, or hanging meats, or the fingers of dead gardeners. The impact comes from the stillness of the piece. It is like the model for a Dutch interior painting, in which the model itself is now given an airing as a room of hanging history, episodes drying out, events desiccating.
Marion Taylor’s ‘Losing Time’ explicitly adopts the theme of time in a small room illuminated by torchlight, but here, time is explicitly renewable, through musical score and rhythm. Set against a clock-face circle of light on a back wall, a metronome ticks. The room is stacked with pianola rolls and sheet music is scattered on the floor. Time is both suffocating and opens up, through rhythm. An egg timer and an everlasting flame signify time lost and time regained.
Lucy Willow’s ‘Shed, Shed’ plays on two meanings of shed, as shedding skin or fur (or sheep’s wool in this case), and shed as shelter, for a childhood moment, or a revelation of quiet interiority in a child-like meditation. A trail of sheep’s fleece leads through a portion of the garden to a small concrete shed, coiling around a child’s chair and flopping onto a cushion. At the end of the expansive thread is a French-knitting bobbin. Is the ‘shedding’ an outgrowth from the small, or a return to the seat of wisdom that is a child-like regression to a small quiet space?
How can such a show be judged? The work speaks for itself, but, given that PALP’s manifesto calls for ‘working together in different spaces and places to reach new audiences’, the show must be judged an unqualified success. 350 people turned up on the opening night, extraordinary for a ‘small’, ‘local’ show.