them what trespass - click-drag on the QTVR movie above to pan left or right - needs Quicktime - read the material below while you wait
artist's statement to accompany the installation them what trespass
"Now my aim is clear: I must show that the house council flat is one of the greatest powers of integration for the thoughts, memories and dreams of mankind. The binding principle in this integration is the daydream. Past, present and future give the house council flat different dynamisms, which often interfere, at times opposing, at others, stimulating one another. In the life of a man, the house council flat thrusts aside contingencies, its councils of continuity are unceasing. Without it, man would be a dispersed being. It maintains him through the storms of the heavens and through those of life. It is body and soul. It is the human being's first world. Before he is 'cast into the world,' as claimed by certain hasty metaphysics, man is laid in the cradle of the house council flat. And always, in our daydreams, the house council flat is a large cradle. A concrete metaphysics cannot neglect this fact, this simple fact, all the more, since this fact is a value, an important value, to which we return in our daydreaming. Being is already a value. Life begins well, it begins enclosed, protected, all warm in the bosom of the house council flat."
Graham Budgett [after Gaston Bachelard] - replacing 'house' with a more site-specific term in a passage from 'The Poetics of Space'
SITED: Camerawork, London 1996 - an 'alternative', 'community', gallery space in London's East End, a mixed area of mainly white working class people and asian immigrants, with a high level of poverty, homelessness, and unemployment. Much of the community around Camerawork lives in local government housing or council flats, rarely visiting Camerawork's exhibitions. The gallery is on a main street with a large 'shopfront' window area; the interior is clearly visible from the street.
them what trespass*
attempted to annex the gallery space to the street by utilising bill-posting
and sign-writing as non-gallery approaches to display. The
images pasted to the gallery walls were produced from miniscule 'Property
Gallery'
images in the upmarket Sunday newspapers that advertise desirable
rural houses for sale. The minimal visual information contained in
such low-resolution
images was digitally enhanced to fabricate, in a vernacular of middle-class
desire, highly idealised 'chocolate-box impressionist' images of home.
Output as electrostatically-printed posters, the images were overlayed
- and negated - on the gallery wall with lines of hand-painted text;
the incongruous and abusive language of the texts physically and
verbally dislocating the seeming tranquility of the image-space.
A commonplace
encounter of the rural with the urban.
(*originally called 'them that trespass')