house

Peckham 1996

The invitation came in 1996 from David Thorp, Director at that time of the South London Gallery, to make an installation / intervention in a house next door to the gallery. The local authority purchased the house to form part of a planned refurbishment and improvement to the exhibition spaces.

Bye the time I arrived, it was in a very poor and in dangerous condition, with floors missing, walls held up by various scaffold poles, no banister on the stairs and just to add to the mix it had an infestation of pigeon’s whose droppings carpeted the floors and staircases. It was unstable and unsafe and the smell was sometimes over powering.

There had been a succession of owners and builders who had attempted to repair the building all of them left their mark. None of them managed to do anything other that make things worse.

However none of these things deterred me in anyway. Fortunately this was at a time when health and safety was not a huge concern. But it was very clear from the start that it would be impossible to invite an audience into see the results of my interventions.

Despite these obstacles I was able to take a few brave (or reckless) people onto the building up the rickety stairs among them was Caroline Rue who wrote an article in Blueprint magazine. Also my assistant Frances Horn, who was then and still is pretty fearless, also came regularly to photograph and film my activities.

Emma Hill director the Eagle Gallery was someone I began to work with and we hatched a plan to make a book about the project called Site Unseen. We invited the writer, art critic and poet to Mel Gooding to write something for the book and also the curator James Putnam. Mel’s contribution would be also partly a poetic response to the work. When I took Mel to see the finished interventions I asked him not to write directly about the work, rather to use the unusual condition of the house as a starting point for ideas that triggered some connection with him. .

(remembering) Mel Gooding

sites of hiding seeking finding keeping in mind what was before/ bombsites gave sight of what only private eyes in love and labour had seen: the everlasting wallpapers of childhood as forever fixed with their roses and flourishes in the world as the hidden orchard behind a hedge with its perennial green apples stolen and sour every passing late summer/ as the unchanging streets on the way to school/ as the smell of creosote on wooden fences that splintered the knuckles that discovered the percussion hidden in their overlapping repetition (just as the saw disclosed the latticed rhyme of laths hidden in the plank plied by the builder at his trade in Peckham High Road)/ unchanging as the unweeded blitzed spaces invaded by rosebay willowherb and inhabited close by St Pauls and further east by black redstarts fooled by wildness/ ‘locations come into existence’ by virtue of the houses whose secret walls and stairways were exposed to weathers and eyes no longer private/ those inside out spaces cleared by firestorm for new beginnings, new occupations by flower and bird, playing child, lovers/for mew builders freeing the space `for settlement and lodging’/bringing the presencing of dwelling in which childhood ends and nothing lasts forever/being human on the earth as mortal

after

innumerable secrecies and numberless intimacies and layered acts of love and hate and hidden complexities of daytime and night time and miseries and felicities and familiarities and kindness and unkindness and domesticities and things done and undone and things undone and sleepings and wakenings and thoughts and deliberations and reveries and dreams and inadvertencies and careful observances and careless derelictions unseen indoors within walls in home and house

these layers revealed (clandestine disclosures) elegant simplicities !

clatter of bright plates

clap of pigeon wings

soft step on the stairs

rustle of treading pigeons on the roof tree

‘…those dying generations…”

familiar they felt barefoot the way to bed

roofed, holding safe hands

stranger, latecomer, trespasser at a private view

I stare at a carpet of birdshit, feathers and broken shells

tread warily upwards without hand hold and down

fearful of falling

(derelict)

quotidian in a house hold life: door hearth window skylight; the framings of a known made world: within, of hall and staircase in electric light, living room and bed room, the fire set or lit; outside, of the walled yard, grass, flowers, leaved tree or winter tracery, weather, the changing sky

images of the days’ and seasons’ turns

measures of a mortal dwelling here

openings merely now/apertures for the unseen light/entrances for wildlife to a cave a hole a darkness: shelter to lives merely given merely taken in a furious and fearful now

1 ( a working visit)

in cold half darkness he hears scufflings scatterings pigeon squab gurglings/he does not live here nobody lives here/he enters these vacancies to make them briefly ‘ locations’ once more/visits an imagined memory upon the place/dwells for a moment in the past/starts to make the works in this present/inhabits the space momentarily (his trespass revives its privacies)

2 (dialectics)

: a simple technique (a kind of thinking) that lets “something appear, within what is present, as this or that, in this way or that way’/in this way by subtraction from what is no longer present/art in this house is ‘a sum of destructions’, a negation of negations:revelation! (something disclosed/something thought)

nothing lasts nobody lives here nothing is lost

this dereliction is an emptying makes possible thoughts and memories

of beginnings and informings

of other orders, other paradigms,

of geometrics and architectonics,

of rhythms and intervals,

of the music in the beautiful near-repetitions of nature

of conjugations and generations

separations and endings

of other rooms in other places

of other windows, other doors

of other uses for the signs these walls