AUGUST LETTER 01/13

At the very base level my design process is one centred around reconstruction — a process of making and breaking. I build rigid formal structures only to go back to dismantle and reconsti-tute them, in doing so essentially exposing the framework itself. In this way I align my work with historical and archaeological models — examination by a means of destruction and subse-quent restoration. To quote Hito Steyerl, “things often have to be destroyed, dissolved in acid, cut apart, or dismantled in order to tell their full story” and Leonard Woolley, “all excavation is destruction”. By way of this reductive process residual elements remain in juxtaposition, the work almost bears the scars of its journey, the seams of assembly exposed, revealing gestures of-ten hidden from the viewer.

Historical and archaeological models are evident in the rational response to content I favour. An approach very much in line with Alison and Peter Smithson’s “as found” mentality — “where the art is in the picking up, turning over and putting-with”. The transposition of preexisting elements butted up against the new, working with and around antecedent forms. Historical rever-ence without rose-tinted nostalgia — I seek to incorporate and sometimes reconstitute the remains of preexisting formats into new work, the past as a foundation. A sometimes unstable foun-dation, one must remain aware of the fallibility of history itself, the delicate process of reconstruction and reenactment “akin to turning an omelette back into an egg”.

Moreover, the outwardly referential nature of my work is something I consider valuable. Here, a visit to John Morgan’s studio in Paddington Station shortly before leaving the UK still greatly informs my work. The manner in which references are boiled down to subtle design moves that allude to archival ma-terial without the need for heavy-handed gestures is something I continually strive for. The same is true with the way Simon

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Starling, for example, is able to string together seemingly dispa-rate elements into cohesive projects and narratives. A consist-ency in materiality runs throughout, weaving together histori-cal, social and associative threads.

These associative connections are something I also find present in my own work — constant parallels drawn between elements, but not overtly stated. Analogous to W.G. Sebald’s use of some-times indecipherable images devoid of labels or descriptions, along with the continual jumps he makes between past and pre-sent, and from descriptive text to historical recollection, room is left for the viewer, space for these disconnects to be deci-phered. This also stems from an interest in the backstory, mar-ginalia and liner notes — the commonly overlooked small-print that rationalises and supplements the primary content.

Woolley, C. Leonard Digging up the Past, 1930, Ernst Benn Ltd, London

Wooley’s primer on the field of archaeology and exca-vation based on a series of six talks broadcast for the BBC. Outlines fieldwork and methodology, the process of discovery through destruction—“all excavation is destruction… all that remains is a hole in the ground and a group of objects in a museum”. p39

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Sebald, W.G. The Rings of Saturn, 1998, Translated from the German by Michael Hulse, Harvill Press, London

The Rings of Saturn chronicles Sebald’s walking tour of the area in which I grew up, East Anglia. His de-lineated narrative frequently jumps between past and present, from descriptive text to historical recounting. Sebald’s text is often punctuated by obscure images, some found, some taken by him, devoid of captions or clear reference. Sebald knowingly made slight adjust-ments to historical truth in an attempt to find, as he put it to Gugging psychiatric patient Ernst Herbeck, “true insights via false paths”.

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Borges, Jorge Luis ‘Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote’, from Ficciones, 1962, Grove Press Inc., New York

A fictional essay in which Borges outlines an author, named Pierre Menard, who rewrites, word for word, sections of Don Quixote and in doing so is “able to enrich the piece by means of a new technique”. Borges exalts his fictive author, declaring his account to be infinitely richer than the original. Generating new work via the repetition of existing forms.

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Steyerl, Hito A Thing Like You and Me, e-flux Journal #15, April 2010, available online at:http://www.e-flux.com/journal/view/134

Written for a solo show in Oslo, Steyerl speaks of the material base of a digital image, an image as a ‘thing’. Of particular note is her remark that “things often have to be destroyed, dissolved in acid, cut apart, or disman-tled in order to tell their full story. To affirm the thing also means participating in its collision with history”. A link to Woolley’s Digging up the Past and Steyerl’s own triptych project In Free Fall (see Images).

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Starling, Simon Cuttings, 2005, Kunstmuseum Basel, Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel & Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern, Germany

Starling, Simon Cuttings [Supplement], 2008, The Power Plant, Toronto

Starling, Simon Never The Same River (Possible Futures, Probable Pasts), 2010, Camden Art Centre File Notes, Camden Art Centre, London

Collections of Starlings works from 1993–2005 and 2005–2008 and accompanying text to show at Camden Art Centre. Starling’s rigorous research methodology, interest in histories of objects and places, and reactiva-tion of outmoded technologies and are of importance. His work is generally reductive in its final outcome, but accompanied by complex narratives and process.

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Asher, Michael Situation Aesthetics : The Work of Mi-chael Asher, 2010, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass

Moeller, Whitney & Rorimer, Anne Michael Asher: George Washington at The Art Institue of Chicago, 1979 and 2005, 2006, Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illnois

Situation Aesthetics is a collection of Asher’s site specific works that engage directly with a space and its history, temporality and the structures of institutions. While, George Washington... focuses directly on Asher’s reloca-tions of a single object—a twentieth century bronze cast of Antoine Houdon’s famous marble statue of Washington. Of note is Asher’s in depth archival re-search and ability to allude to a place’s past with subtle, elegant, often structural interventions.

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Fast, Omer The Casting, 2008, Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Walther Konig, Koln

Publication to accompany Omer Fast’s video piece The Casting, designed in collaboration with Manuel Raeder. The piece consists of two hanging screens on which still footage of constructed narrative scenes are pro-jected on to one side. On the reverse is a fragmentary interview between Fast and a US army sergeant. Fast takes the sergeant’s two stories, one set on a road in Iraq and one in a road in Germany, cuts them up and reconstitutes them forming a new account. The reverse of the video clearly shows these cuts, the underlying structure of Fast’s reconstructed narrative revealed.

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Lütticken, Sven Secret Publicity: Essays on Contemporary Art, 2005, NAi Publishers, Rotterdam

Lütticken, Sven Viewing Copies: On the Mobility of Mov-ing Images, e-flux Journal, #8, September 2009, avail-able online at: http://e-flux.com/journal/view/75In Secret Publicity the essays ‘Planet of the Remakes’

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(p.119), ‘Appropriation Mythology’ (p.83) and ‘Bik Van der Pol’s Repetitions’ (p.155) are of particular note. Lutticken’s writings are often concerned with the reactivation of forms and strategies from the history of the avant-garde. ‘Planet of the Remakes’ for example, makes reference to serials and the culture of Holly-wood remakes, in relation to discussion of artists such as Stan Douglas and Pierre Huyghe.

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Lütticken, Sven (ed) Life, Once More: Forms of Reenact-ment in Contemporary Art, 2005, Witte de With, Rot-terdam

Publication to accompany Witte de With exhibition curated by the aforementioned Sven Lütticken, includ-ing an essay entitled ‘An Arena in Which to Reenact’ by Lütticken and texts by participating artists. Useful col-lection of artists working in the field of re-enactment / reconstruction discussing their own work and inten-tions behind it.

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Blackson, Robert Once More… With Feeling: Reenact-ment in Contemporary Art and Culture, Art Journal, Spring 2007

Written whilst Robert Blackson was curator at the Reg Vardy Gallery, Once More… With Feeling identifies cur-rent artistic practises which make use of reenactment and reconstruction. Of note is Jeremy Deller’s The Battle of Orgreave, a reconstruction of a 1980s miners’ strike that does more than retell the event. In bas-ing the work on personal accounts of the strike rather than newspaper articles or archival material, Deller’s reconstruction was warped by memory. As Tom Mor-ton notes in his Frieze article on Deller, The Battle of Orgreave became more than simply a piece about the strike, but “a part of its history, an epilogue to an expe-rience.”

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Jenkins, Keith Re-thinking History, 1991, Routledge, London

Jenkins on historiography and the impact of a histori-ans own personal world view on their reading of his-tory. He identifies a separation between the ‘past’ and history, recognising the past as a “construction site” of facts on which history is built.

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Arns, Inke Tripping into Art (Hi)Stories: Genealogy and / as Fiction. On the Exhibition “What is Modern Art? (Group Show)”, from What is Modern Art (Group Show), 2006, edited by Inke Arns and Walter Benjamin

Text emailed to me by Inke Arns in response to some questions about the “Walter Benjamin” lecture Mon-drian ‘63-’96 given from ‘beyond the grave’. (see Im-ages) An accompanying essay to the exhibition What is Modern Art? (Group Show), which brought together projects with roots in the South-Eastern European art scene of the 1970s and 80s based on the practise of anonymity and copying.

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Herzog, Werner Minnesota Declaration: Truth and Fact in Documentary Cinema, April 30, 1999 at Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota, avail-able online at: http://filmvideo.walkerart.org/detail.wac?id=3286&title=articles

In relation to Sebald’s “true insights via false paths”, Herzog’s lecture at the Walker Art Center denounces Cinema Verité as being “devoid of verité. It reaches a merely superficial truth, the truth of accountants.” And speaks of an “ecstatic truth” in cinema, in relation to sometimes staged scenes in his documentaries used in order to go beyond what is at hand. A slight distortion of the ‘factual’ format in an attempt to reach what he terms the “deeper strata of truth in cinema”.

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Lee, Stewart ‘Joe Pasquale’, Sunday Times, Decem-ber 1995, available online at: http://www.stewartlee.co.uk/press/writtenformoney/1995-dec-joe_pas-quale-sundaytimes.htm & http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YE9Kthyaco

English comedian’s Sunday Times article on material theft in stand-up comedy and specifically Joe Pasquale’s re-use of a Michael Redmond joke. Lee later performed a routine at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2006 which included a joke which Joe Pasquale wouldn’t be able to steal.

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Roberts, Jennifer L. Mirrored Travels: Robert Smithson and History, 2000, Yale University Philosophy PhD Thesis

A PhD thesis on the “an entire complex of historical reference and reflection in Smithson’s work.” With particular discussion of the relationship between Spiral Jetty and the Golden Spike pageant to celebrate the centennial of the first transcontinental railroad held a year before Spiral Jetty was built. Roberts considers the two monuments “connected by more than merely an accident of geographical continuity.”

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Roelstraete, Dieter, The Way of the Shovel: On the Ar-cheological Imaginary in Art, e-flux Journal #4, March

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2009, available online at: http://www.e-flux.com/jour-nal/view/51#_ftn6

On the use of archaeological methodology in contem-porary art—“methodological complex that includes the historical account, the archive, the document, the act of excavating and unearthing, the memorial, the art of reconstruction and reenactment, the testimony”. Use-ful connection between texts such as Woolley’s Digging up the Past and contemporary practise.

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Freud, Sigmund The “Uncanny”, 1919, first published in Imago, Bd. V., 1919; reprinted in Sammlung, FünfteFolge, Translated by Alix Strachey

Freud on the ability of something to seem both famil-iar yet distance at once, and the sense of unease that it creates. Useful in its discussion of viewing dupli-cates, copies, reconstructions and in relation to Sven Lütticken’s discourse on the film Solaris in ‘Planet of the Remakes’. Also, to Stan Douglas’ video piece Der Sandmann which takes E.T.A. Hoffmann’s folk tale and Freud’s discussion of it, as a starting point.

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White, Hayden ‘The Value of Narrativity in the Repre-sentation of Reality’ from The Content of Form: Narra-tive Discourse and Historical Representation, 1987, John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, Maryland

On the issues of narrative form in historical represen-tation, the problems encountered in the retelling of historical events and the balance to be struck between analysis and narrative—“Historical narration without analysis is trivial, historical analysis without narration is incomplete.” The obstacles that must be overcome in a successful reconstruction / reenactment of previous events.

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FILMS

Kon Tiki dir. Thor Heyerdahl, 1951, Camrose Media

Documentary of Thor Heyerdahl’s famous 4,300 mile voyage from Peru to Tahiti. The crew built and trav-elled in a rudimentary balsa wood raft constructed from native materials according indigenous plans in an at-tempt to prove Heyerdahl’s theory that pre-Columbian Polynesian natives made trips across the ocean. A key example of experimental archaeology, putting theory into practise as a means of evidence.

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The Third Memory dir, Pierre Huyghe, 2000, Two-channel video projection, 9min 32sec, available online

at: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x3izfb_the-third-memory-huyghe_shortfilms

A reenactment of the 1972 bank robbery by John Woj-towicz famously depicted in Dog Day Afternoon (1975). Huyghe intersperses footage from the film with that of Wojtowicz himself recounting the robbery in a recon-structed set of the bank. The Third Memory presents a somewhat distorted account of events with Wojtowicz’s memory evidently influenced by the film and Pacino’s portrayal of him. Wojtowicz even mentions how he had watched Pacino in The Godfather prior to the robbery as inspiration—a circularity between popular culture and reality.

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Vertical Feature Remake, dir. Peter Greenaway, 1978

A somewhat satirical account of the fictional Institute of Reclamation and Restoration and their attempts to reconstruct a proposed, but never made, film by Tulse Luper, a fictional ornithologist regularly mentioned by Greenaway. The film presents 4 remakes from foot-age of vertical objects, each using different structural film methods to count to the 121 (11x11) objects. As Greenaway puts it “Vertical Features Remake is a love-hate, or more appropriately, celebration-criticism, of structural method, unthinkingly and stupidly dominant in film circles at that time”.

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Little Dieter Needs to Fly dir. Werner Herzog, 1998, Anchor Bay Entertainment

Documentary film on Dieter Dengler and his capture in Vietnam. Herzog takes Dengler back to the place of his capture and, with locals cast as his captures, recre-ates the ordeal as Dengler narrates events. Rather than a simple retelling of Dengler’s experience set to foot-age, Herzog physically retraces Dengler’s steps through reconstructed scenes. An example of Herzog’s staged factual method alluded to in the Minnesota Declaration.

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Standard Gauge dir. Morgan Fisher, 1984

Production Stills dir. Morgan Fisher, 1970

Two films I have actually yet to see but have arranged to view at The Film-Makers’ Co-operative in New York. Standard Gauge is a film of fragments—fragments of narration, of autobiography, of film history—woven together in one contentious shot. A reconstituting of disparate elements into one cohesive piece. Production Stills is a document of its own process. A film that came into existence through its production and ended when the production ended.

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Still from Series 3, Episode 6 of The Chief, 1993, Granada Television, original transmission on ITV, 21 May 1993

The Chief was an ITV television series set in East An-glia which ran from 1990–1995. It starred Tim Pigott-Smith and later Martin Shaw as Chief Constable of the Eastland police constabulary. Much of the series was filmed on location in East Anglia and episode 6, of series 3 was filmed, in part, in my childhood home. In the episode a sub-story of a man caught curb-crawling plays out in various scenes shot around the house. In order to film the episode photographs of the rooms were taken before they were dismantled and everything put back in its exact place. Of note is the reshuffling of rooms by the crew (moving the man’s room to where my sister’s room is), the use of real location rather than sets and the odd sense of seeing my home as the back-drop for a fictional narrative.

Still from In Free Fall by Hito Steyerl, 2010

A piece consisting of 3 short films—‘After the Crash’, ‘Before the Crash’ and ‘Crash’—In Free Fall charts the biography of a plane that began as a part of Howard Hughes’ TWA fleet, was sold to the Israel military and housed in an aeroplane graveyard in the Mojave Desert, where it met its end as a prop in the film Speed. Of real interest is Steyerl’s initial plan for the project. To take a plane stored in the graveyard, blow it up in a Holly-wood film and to ship its debris to China to be con-verted into recycled aluminium which would become DVDs on which a pirated version of the film would be printed. The plane’s destruction printed on its own remnants. A circularity of de and re-construction that charts the specific history of an object.

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Upper Lawn Pavilion Alison & Peter Smithson, 1961, Fonthill Abbey, Wiltshere, England

The Smithson’s weekend home in Wiltshire represents a prime example of their “as found” approach, by which a site is treated almost as a found object—“Where the art is in the picking up, turning over and putting-with”. Responsive to their own specific needs and the site itself, Upper Lawn Pavilion incorporates a preexisting wall, foundations, chimney and windows on the site, blending old and new into a cohesive structure. A com-bination of somewhat disparate elements held together by a consistency in materiality and rhythm.

Invitation for The Work shown in this space is a response to the existing conditions and/or work previously shown within the space. Christopher D’Arcangelo & Peter Na-din, 1978–79, 84 West Broadway, New York

A series of successive shows initiated by D’Arcangel and Nadin’s, in which each contributor was invited to respond contiguously to the existing structure and work in the space. It opened with an empty gallery, entitled 30 Days Work a reference to the time put into refurbishing the space, and was subsequently added to until D’Arcangelo’s death in 1979. The invite listed the shows sequentially with the opening text: “We have joined together to execute functional construc-tions and to alter or refurbish existing structures as a means of surviving in a capitalist economy”. Parallels can be drawn to the Smithon’s “as found” mentality and notions of continual reconstruction—which each show the space is reevaluated and added to, accumulating a growing body of work.

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Stills from Actualité, 2001 & Western Recording, 2003, Mathais Poledna

Taking cues from the Lumiere brothers and Godard’s One Plus One / Sympathy for the Devil, Actualité de-picts a band played by actors (some from the actual band Rilo Kiley) dressed in recognisably 1980s post punk ‘uniform’ as they rehearse, never getting going, stuck in a stop-start loop. Western Recording is a 16mm film installation of a man rehearsing Harry Nilsson’s 1969 song ‘City Life’ in the famous LA studio Western Recording, where the Beach Boys recorded Pet Sounds. In both the pieces we see the rehearsal process, flaws, repetitions and all, without the polished end product. Western Recording is particularly interesting given the fact that Nilsson never toured or played live. Both make explicit historical references to popular music without nostalgic reverence, sitting in some transitional space in time, the tropes of a specific moment evoked but not repeated.

Autoxylopyrocycloboros, 2006 & Inverted Retrograde Theme, USA (House for a Songbird), 2002, Simon Starling

Autoxylopyrocycloboros is a four-hour long entropic voy-age across Loch Long on a small wooden steamboat fuelled by wood cut piece-by-piece from its own hull. The boat itself, having been reclaimed from the bottom of Lake Windermere, in a cyclical sense of origin and return, sinks to the bottom of Loch Long. Inverted Ret-rograde Theme… consists of two 1:5 scale models based on housing projects in Puerto Rico designed by Simon Schmiderer in the early 1960s, installed up-side down to act as cages for song birds. Starling’s ability to trace histories, connections and narratives, and to weave together disparate elements into cohesive works, them-selves often journeys is of particular note. A meshing of craft, material, social history, association, memory and in depth yet divergent research.

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Before and after image of the recolouring process used on a episode of Dad’s Army by the Colour Recovery Working Group from the Guardian article ‘Unscrambling an Army of Colours’, Thursday 11 December 2008

Due to archival purges and wiping, many television programmes made by the BBC and ITV in the 1960s and early ‘70s were deleted. In a number of cases the only surviving copies of the broadcasts are black and white film recordings made for countries that didn’t yet have colour television capabilities. The result is a col-lection of TV programmes originally broadcast in col-our, existing only in black and white. Through the work of James Insell, the Colour Recovery Working Group have been able to identify colour information in chroma dots accidentally recorded in the black and white film and in some cases restore the film back to its original colour. A restorative process that is able to essentially fill voids in the archives. A process which the Guardian article describes as “akin to turning an omelette back into an egg”.

Michael Asher Santa Monica Museum of Modern Art, 2008, January 26–April 12. Scan of spread from Support Structures edited by Céline Condorelli, 2009, Sternberg Press, Berlin, New York

A reconstruction of all the stud walls in precisely the same positions as they were in each of the 44 previous exhibitions in the space since 1998, exactly according to the floor plans of each show. In physically manifest-ing the spatial changes within the building all at the same time Asher creates juxtapositions of skeletal walls overlapping and creating new spaces that never before existed. In making a work for a gallery with no perma-nent collections, a space constantly changing with each successive show, Asher manages to archive every single show in the institution’s history without showing any of the actual work. Here history reveals nothing other than its own structural process.

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Photograph of Mondrian ‘63 - ‘96 a lecture presented by the long dead Walter Benjamin, 1986, Cankarjev Dom, Ljubljana organised by Gallery ŠKUC, Ljubljana. Photographed credited to “László Moholy-Nagy”

A lecture by Benjamin, dead for almost half a century at the time, on works by Piet Mondrian produced after his death in 1944. The lecture deals with repetition as a generation of the new. Links to Borges’ ‘Pierre Me-nard’ and notions of the validity of the copy and repeti-tion / reconstruction.

Photograph of London Bridge relocated from the Thames River, London to Lake Havasu, Arizona, 1968–71, from Historic American Engineering Record

In 1967 London Bridge was dismantled and, after being bought by Robert P. McCulloch, shipped to a planned community in Lake Havasu, Arizona. The granite from the original structure, which dated back to 1831, was used to clad the new bridge in Arizona. The relocation later became the subject of a 1985 TV movie, Bridge Across Time, starring David Hasselhoff, in which the bridge was said to have brought with it the soul of Jack the Ripper. A reconstitution of a structure in a totally different place and time. (It was also part of an urban myth that McCulloch had purchased London Bridge thinking it was the more impressive Tower Bridge.)

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Stills from File Under Sacred Music by Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard, 2003, ICA London

A re-staging of an infamous bootleg video documenting a live performance by The Cramps to patients at the Napa State Mental Institute on the 13th June, 1978. The new lineup formed from a mixture of current musicians and the audience from Core Arts, a mental health charity in East London. The video quality is manually degraded from broadcast quality to that of the VCR of the original, purchased from eBay. The piece attempts to examine the notion of ‘liveness’ and in doing so it moves beyond simple re-representation creating an almost alternate reality.

Still from Message from Andrée, by Joachim Koester, 2005, Danish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale

Taking S. A. Andrée’s failed arctic balloon expedi-tion of 1897 as its starting point, Koester’s 16mm film installation focuses not on deciphering the salvaged photographs of the expedition found persevered in ice, but on the undecipherable, the ruined images of visual noise. The result is a video piece that points to the lack of clarity in historical events, the holes in the archive, “the twilight zone of what can be told and what can-not be told, narrative and non-narrative, document and mistake.”

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Norman Bel Geddes, ‘Coral Sea: Norman Bel Geddes’ re-enact naval battle’ Life Magazine, May 25, 1942, seen at CCA Montreal in Architecture in Uniform: De-signing and Building for the Second World War, 2011

American theatrical and industrial designer, Norman Bel Geddes’ reenacted didactic dioramas for Life Maga-zine. Geddes’s models provide the reader with simu-lated depictions of battles in real-time, with as much detail as possible at the time. In recreating scenes so close to them actually happening a degree of guesswork and approximation is naturally required. Reconstruc-tion without the benefit of historical hindsight, recon-struction as almost direct response.

Designed by Fraser Muggeridge Studio, Fraser Mug-geridge, 2010, Kaleid Editions, London

A collection of 48 books designed by Fraser Mug-geridge literally taken part and rebound as an edition of 48 new books, forming more than merely a compilation of the studios work but a work in itself. The rebinding however is not simply arbitrary. Like the Asher piece, a carefully considered underlying structure determines the form of the book. The 48 previously existing books are unbound and separated into sections which come together forming odd juxtapositions and combinations. As Eric Kindel notes, in an essay included in the book, “a dis-binding of the past to examine its entrails; a re-binding to make whole again”. The result is “a sort of history, but now”.

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Four Corners Books Familiars Series, designed by John Morgan Studio, 2007–

The Familiars series consisting of artist responses to classic novels / short stories, is particulate noteworthy for John Morgan’s meticulous design work. Each book is peppered with referential design moves, each ele-ment founded in the given content with great attention to materiality. More and than a mere re-design, devoid of heavy-handed gestures or arbitrary decisions, by way of understated aesthetics grounded in historical allu-sion, Morgan is able to create a series of beautiful and considered book objects.