March: objects in places

Pair of four-panel screens, ink and color on paper

What a weird month, spring and then not spring. My theme for this month has been: objects in places.

• Arranging Things: A Rhetoric of Object Placement (Leonard Koren, 2003)

• Bristol Light Festival (curator Katherine Jewkes, full credits here, 2022)

• Sculpture in the City (artistic director Stella Ioannou, full credits here, 2021-22)

At the start of this month Terry and I went to the Bristol Light Festival, a bunch of light-based artworks on show for a week around the centre of Bristol. And at the end of the month we walked around the Sculpture in the City trail, a bunch of sculptures around the western part of “the City”, that little square mile in the middle of London where they keep the bankers.

This month I also read Leonard Koren’s Arranging Things: a Rhetoric of Object Placement, an extremely out-of-print book (I read a friend’s copy) about putting objects in little piles in different places and how it feels to look at them. Koren talks about what it means to arrange objects, and how people go about it, and then experiments with a system for analysing different little piles of things:

• Hierarchy: what do you notice first? what seems most important?

• Alignment: how are the objects arranged?

• Sensoriality: what colours are they, what textures do they imply?

• Metaphor: What is the arrangement like? Does it seem to represent anything?

• Mystification: Is it confusing? Is something weird or out-of-place and thereby intriguing or off-putting?

• Narrative: is a story implied?

• Coherence: how does the whole thing hold together? How do the objects relate?

• Resonance: what does the little pile make you think? How, and how long for, does it hold your interest?

I enjoyed the book a lot! The bulk of it really digs into Koren’s system — he looks at a lot of different paintings of piles of objects by Nathalie du Pasquier, and talks about each one through some of these different lenses, the objects, the background, where they seem to be, what they imply, how it feels to look at them. The analysis is expressive rather than “right”, and it’s also a real achievement of noticing. Sometimes I would look at one of the paintings and find it a little bit boring and then catch myself being bored, and overwrite that thought: no, it must be interesting, there must be something about it or why would du Pasquier have painted it, why would Koren be writing about it? And then in his summary of it, of its resonance, he’s just, like, “yeah this is really boring to look at huh”, exposing a response that I wasn’t even letting myself be conscious of.

Anyway, an exhibition spread through an urban space is basically a way of arranging stuff in little piles, so I thought it might be fun to try applying Koren’s analytical system to the exhibitions.

Swing Song

Disco Ball

End Over End

Bristol Light Festival (2022)

Hierarchy: When you go to a city to see a light festival, the thing you notice first is — well — lights. Lights that are part of the festival, sure. But also just: lights, any lights. Lights left on in office blocks. House lights. Pedestrian crossings, traffic lights. Everything that lights up is suddenly under suspicion of art. Is that a critique of contemporary advertising practices, or is it just an advertisement? Is the light across the curve of that wall just the headlights of a dozen different cars, or is it a shape and a motion that’s there on purpose for us to look at? This is one of the things I love about artworks placed in cities, the way they make us look at other things with the same sort of suspicion and attentiveness that we give the deliberate installations, sometimes jokingly, sometimes for real.

Alignment: The installations for this festival are spread out in an arrangement that is presumably dictated by a combination of sightlines, communicative intent, variety, walkability, and just a bunch of extremely awkward logistical questions about access and who owns what land. Huge pieces of coloured perspex stand in a circle in the middle of Queen Square, at the point where eight radiating pathways meet. Lights in the form of a giant slinky sit on a purpose-built plinth by the waterside. Each installation becomes the most important thing in its location, partly because it’s new and temporary and partly because, well, it’s lights; but also because of the way everyone responds to it, the big explanatory signs near each piece, deliberate visitors stopping (they’ve reached their destination), passers-by slowing down, a gentle circle of spectators at different distances taking photos or posing.

Sensoriality: An arrangements of lights is different from most arrangements in that the process of looking at it becomes visible on the viewer: a purple haze glowing onto someone’s face, moving lights circling around their feet. The nights we go to the festival it’s a little cold, a little rainy, and the lights are reflected clearly in puddles or as a tint on damp pavements.

There’s sound too, playing from misty-coloured spheres hanging from a roof outside a bar, music over speakers by the giant disco ball, lit-up swings in a park making gentle noises as people move them, but more than that, there’s people talking. “Oh, I like this one,” a woman says at the slinky. “Do you want to do the disco ball next?” someone else asks. One of the pieces, Overheard In Bristol, we don’t see, but from the text in the programme it sounds like it’s a yearly installation: just a phrase, the sort of thing someone might say in Bristol but not in other places, inscribed in lit-up writing that turns this constant process of overhearing into an explicit part of the festival.

Metaphor: The arrangement of lights in a city is like a party. This is explicit in the disco ball, and in Office Party, one of my favourites from the festival, a piece where coloured lights shine on blinds that move up and down in the windows of an office viewed from across a canal. But it also emerges from the arrangement as a whole. People who don’t necessarily know each other are moving around, looking at things, lit up by the lights they’re looking at, connected by their mutual activity, overhearing each other, listening to music.

Lockdown’s been officially over in the UK for a while but Terry and I are still being careful, not going to parties or indoor events; and it was just so good to stop and sit outside a pub and have a beer and look at all these people moving about in the lights.

Orphans

Silent Agitator

The Garden of Floating Words

Sculpture in the City (2021-22)

Hierarchy: we are in the City on the weekend, and everything is closed, which is technically the first thing we notice, mainly because we’re hungry and were hoping to pick up a sandwich to eat on a windswept bench. But — look, it’s the City, the top of the hierarchy is the huge mirrored buildings everywhere, a woman walking past, “did you know that the Cheesegrater is that shape because—” to her friend and we don’t hear the end but we can guess, it’s always the same story in London when a building is weird-shaped: the Cheesegrater, one of the skyscrapers with a cute nickname that stops us from questioning its purpose too intently, is that shape because it has to avoid the protected sightlines to St Paul’s Cathedral. It is very important to be able to see St Paul’s Cathedral from certain distant hills, and this is reflected in many building restrictions across the whole of London.

This is deeply weird, of course, and is kind-of the physical hierarchy of the City in a sentence, the big-money skyscrapers everywhere and multiplying but still allowing for the old golden-brown guild halls and churches, such huge important buildings in their day, nestled now like little teddy bears in among the mirrors. And then, tucked in among the already-tucked-in, a few things emerge on a human scale: benches, a little bit of art, a single open Costa stall with warning tape along its wonky awning.

I love the City on weekends; it is so odd that all this money and all this power has been jammed into a little square mile and then on weekends it’s just left there, watched over by a million CCTV cameras but otherwise almost empty. But even empty, nothing about the arrangement implies that the art within it, or the people looking at the art, are important. I should read that big — you know, that Thomas Piketty book about money, I think as I wander around, just baffled by everything: what are the buildings for? Why are there so many of them? What do bankers do? Why are there so many of them?

Is that art, we wonder, approaching an upright tree with no branches, and then two more behind it, and I think it must be, but no: it’s just three large equally-spaced trees that have had all of their branches cut off but have been left otherwise upright.

Alignment: The big buildings are at weird angles, whether that’s to line up with streets built hundreds of years ago, or to lean out of the way of some distant hill’s view of St Paul’s, or to stand out from the crowd of not-quite-identical peers. Everything else is visible in gaps between, in awkward corners, little irregular gardens.

Sensoriality: The sense experience of being in the City is replicated in a lot of the art, which this year as always includes a lot of, y’know, business art: big shapes built out of metal, piled up or scrunched or bent over, painted purple or yellow or teal or maybe with some sort of gentle texture. The business art looks smooth and it’s hard to have any feelings about it; I try and they slide right off. There’s some metal, it’s a shape, fine. It’s not that I think this sort of business art is bad: it’s more that I can’t think anything about it at all, positioned as it is near all the large business buildings.

The works that aren’t like this stand out. One piece we come across feels particularly good to look at: a set of three organic-feeling giant eggs, textured, angular, out of place.

Mystification: One installation is a giant clock saying ORGANIZATION around the dial. “Time to organize”. It is, we read on its explanatory plaque, a real-world replica of an early twentieth century sticker promoting unionisation efforts. This is, yes, mystifying to see here, in this place. Who is it addressed to? Is it telling the bankers to unionise? Is it warning them that labour reform is coming for them? Is it speaking to the security staff, cleaning staff, waiters at the generously scattered steakhouses? Why is this here? Why is this here? We look at it for a long while. It is approximate, messy, not quite symmetrical. I should join a union, I think, which I think every six months or so and then stall when I can’t describe my job well enough to figure out what sort of union I could join. Still, I am definitely more likely to join a union than I am to read Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century.

Narrative: By each artwork there’s a little map showing you where other artworks in the exhibition are placed, and giving information about the work.

When we read about the wonky geometry eggs we learn that they are made out of stretched canvases painted by people who have since died. The artist has assembled them into these egg forms, facing inwards. He is giving them a second life. I find this repellant, grotesquely hierarchical: look, these paintings that someone laboured over and which their heirs discarded are still worth something when used as invisible materials by me, the Real Artist. I feel like the artist has tricked me into liking his work, and I also think: I bet he didn’t even glue the canvases together himself, the dick, I bet a technician did it.

When I get home I look him up, and see that this isn’t true: he talks about his sore fingers, about sandpapering the eggs over and over. Lots of people have posted to his Instagram talking about how moving they find the eggs; probably some of them are people who, unlike me, have had to deal with a dead person’s belongings, who have perhaps even taken old canvases along to a charity shop. I feel a bit ashamed of myself but I also discover, looking at this documentation, that the inside of the eggs is filled with foam, so that even if you broke them open you wouldn’t be able to see the paintings.

Coherence: I don’t know. Something about this all does work, in a way that sits outside any individual sculpture. Some of the art is big phrases, written up on signs or in lights, and honestly it’s rare for this sort of art to work for me in the way that I feel it’s intended to, but here it makes me notice the other big phrases written all around, pulls them into the experience. The unionisation clock is bewildering in the same way that the whole question of why are these buildings here, how does money even work is bewildering. And after you see enough business art, sometimes things switch around and for a moment the skyscrapers look like giant sculptures just hanging out there, big metal shrugs, rather than the business art looking like gestures towards the skyscrapers.

Resonance: We end at the Gherkin. This is where we find an open coffee stall. The benches around the twirled mirrors of the Gherkin are engraved with suggestive sentences. One of them says: An ornamental lake, on which floats a small sailing boat or bark, with a bark-textured hull. One of them says A bronze representation of a guitar (realistic) leaning on the trunk of a tree. (A silver birch.)

This isn’t part of the Sculpture in the City exhibition; it’s always here. I’d forgotten about it and I love it. I love the careful deliberation of the punctuation! The unlikely but not impossible phrases! This is An Arcadian Dream Garden by Ian Hamilton Finlay, and — look, these grey benches, these precise phrases describing somewhere that is definitely much nicer, I find it funny and charming and evocative and inexplicable, why is it here, why is it here, why is any of it here, why aren’t I in the very nice garden that I know is only a couple of blocks away? I take some photos. Probably they’re of the exact same phrases I took photos of last time I was here, looking at these benches, laughing.