The Garden Centre Plinth: a modest proposal for the dismantling of art and architecture

8/8/2019 The Garden Centre Plinth: a modest proposal for the dismantling of art and architecture

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snail) to the University and the City Centre.In fact, this city has no centre.

To one side of thearch is a street sign:ST CLEMENTS LANE– to one end of thissign has been pastedthe graphic of askull, to the other a

cartoon face, goofy and toothy. The bonebeneath the fun; one in dialogue with theother.

This is almost certainly a very old route. Thechapel after which it is named is long sunk into the flood plain. It connects exactly toHowell Road (named after the leader of theCelts ethnically cleansed from the city by‘Saint’ Athelstan in the tenth century) whichthen snakes half a mile to the city’s HighStreet. Somewhere along the steep lane areburied two victims of the city’s notorioustheatre fire – the worst in its nation’s history.



The Alley Today

Today the lane is a transitory place – there isoccasionally some dealing in the sub-alleytowards the bottom, more often the lowwalls serve as perches for hard drinkers,squeezing their bottles and scowlinggrumpily at the snaking files of officeworkers, yawning students and perkyteenage day trippers.

The one thing that distinguishes this space isan odd residence built around its halfwaymark about seven years ago. Trumpeted as a‘space age’ (you already know it is ananachronism) icon for new arrivals to thecity, to define the city’s newfound modernity,nobody would buy it and it has defaulted tostudent accommodation. Its fringe is nowalways generously larded with rubbish –bottles, papers, timetables, wrappers.



But almost a year ago now,a different kind of deposit appeared on the lane:three pieces of a gardensculpture, a robed figurecast in yellowy grey. Thepieces did not add up tothe whole artwork, but strewn about the verybottom of the lane they at least suggested the collapse of somethingimagined. A glance and a tentative toeingrevealed cheap neo-classical Garden Centretat.

When I first came acrossthe debris, I trod around it.The next time Iphotographed it. Therewas something ‘aesthetic’about the relation of thedifferent pieces; each timeI passed they had movedinto a new composition.







into the dealers’ alley, and settled into ashallow gulley for the duration. By now thesummer had come and plants grew tallaround the remaining piece of the sculpture.I realised I had never thought much about what it had been when whole. Never thought about that at all, in fact. I was only everinterested in it in pieces. And yet, without visualising it as a material whole, I hadalways had an idea of it, had always carriedthat around – of its modesty, of itsuncomfortable playfulness, of its sinisterreticence. These were like pocketablePlatonic ideals.



Purpose

A month and a half ago that final piecemoved back to the grass. I often wonderedwhat moved the pieces – foxes, dogs, the

drunks, the dealers? And towhat purpose?

Piles of rubbish sprang uparound the piece and thenit disappeared. For a whileI assumed that it wasburied in the rubbish, but my digging revealed nostone. I accepted that it had

gone for good. The rubbish was removed,and the stone did not, and has not, returned.My year-long ‘entertainment’ was over.About a week later afourth piece of thesculpture appearedon the grass. Wheredid it come from?Had someone been saving it up for just this



eventuality? Had I thought it into being? The‘accidental’ patterns of movement andarrangement were perhaps not as accidentalas I thought. A pronoid dreamer wasdreaming up treats for me. Since then thefourth piece has largely aped the behaviourof the third and is at present becalmedamong the flowerless stalks in the gulley indealers’ alley.

Public Art

As well as a lesson in the free entertainment available in the city - this dance performancehas run and run and is running still, withself-contained episodes, running gags andchanges of cast – it now strikes me,pronoiacally, that there is a possiblearchitectural practice, or an approach topublic art, here.

Project: the construction of giant sculpturalworks or decorative buildings, erected ineasily disassembled pieces. The pieces would



be large enough not tobe blown away, smallenough to be stolen orcarried off, ‘wittily’repositioned, orcleared by sanitationworkers. The work would originally beplaced in a single site,but would spread out across the city, itsdifferent partsevoking both the

absence of its whole and the circulation of its‘idea’. Areas that were never favoured withiconic buildings or public art wouldaccumulate them as they wished. A kind of dispersive art would see the practiceextended to existing buildings, as iconic,signature constructions buildings wereslowly pulled apart, smuggled home,trafficked into the suburbs, and spread,democratically, across the face of the city.



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The Garden Centre Plinth: a modest proposal for the dismantling of art and architecture