Writing / Posted by Rich
My text for The Survivalist Series publication produced to accompany The Survivalist Series, a series of commissions by artists invited by CAAPO to explore what the term ‘survival’ might mean. My text was written in response to my experiences creating Dead Reckoning for the Series.
I had made a small number of works on the theme of Survival before I was commissioned for The Survivalist Series. On those occasions I chose a more conceptual approach, with works exploring the survival of a building and the survival of artists during the age of austerity. For the Survivalist Series I decided to approach the idea literally (at first). That is not to say the work didn’t express certain ideas about the survival of art and artists, it just wasn’t where I began.
I began by researching actual survival techniques with a view to using one of them as a method for generating a sculpture. I looked at map reading, trap building, shelter building, fire making, sourcing food and water, and also at the more extreme end of survivalist culture, with bunkers and stockpiling weapons and food. This yielded a number of interesting possibilities, but the one that particularly stood out was Dead Reckoning: an outdated method of estimating your position on a map based on how long, what speed, and what direction you have travelled. This method has the inbuilt potential for compounding errors; you may not travel in an exactly straight line and your speed may not be constant. Each time you calculate your position you may be drifting further and further away from where you think you are.
The piece for The Survivalist Series was this idea taken to an extreme degree. I attempted to locate the centre of the space by passing back and forth with a length of yarn, each time trying to cross the centre. With each passing the network of lines got more and more complicated and navigating through it became more and more difficult. Whilst trying to take stock of my position in the midst of the yarn I would correct my trajectory, and it would not always be correct.
All of this occurred in full view of the public through the full length window of the shop space I was working in. This is a situation I really enjoy as people can see the work evolve, ask questions and generally be nosey. When they ask ‘what’s happening?’ I explain in a very straight-forward way ‘I’m making a sculpture.’ If they want to know more they ask ‘what’s it about?’ and I explain, without jargon, what I’m doing. Generally people are pleased with this - even those who were initially sceptical can appreciate the very matter-of-fact and open way that I explain what I’m doing. I don’t treat them like idiots and I don’t try to baffle them with high-concept ideas. This goes some way to placating the threat that some people feel from art.
I have noticed on many occasions, working on mine and other people’s projects, the threat that art poses. The main problem seems to be the unknown; they don’t know what this is, what it’s doing or why it’s there. The conversation stated above usually softens this feeling as I don’t couch things in terms that are equally as unknown or unfamiliar; the realisation that this is not a difficult thing to understand occurs. However, some people just don’t want art happening in public places and will openly tell me that they don’t like it, don’t want it and think it’s a waste of time and money. This is fair enough - you can’t please everybody.
At the beginning of the project I hadn’t thought about the possibility that the survival situation I would encounter would not be one of my own survival but one of the public’s against the threat I was posing. The fear of the unknown is perhaps the key survival instinct - approaching the unfamiliar carefully, or even not at all, for fear of provoking an unknown and possibly dangerous response. Whilst making Dead Reckoning I encountered a subtly different reaction to the usual fear of the unknown which I can only really explain via the theory of mansplaining. This term grew following widespread internet coverage of an essay from Rebecca Solnit’s book ‘Men Explain Things to Me’ (Haymarket Books, 2014) in which the author describes actual situations were women’s expertise has been dismissed by men purely on the grounds of the men assuming that they themselves must be right. Because they are men.
On three or four occasions I noticed couples stop to look at the work. These couples were male/female and a range of age groups. On every occasion the woman would see the sculpture through the window and want to stop and look. The man would be reluctant. On one occasion, when the couple eventually came up to read the interpretation material in the window, I overheard some of their conversation. After reading some of the text the man declared, with arms folded, ‘told you, time-lapse photography.’ He was right and that’s all he needed to know. He’d worked out what was happening. He continued in this tone, explaining to his partner how, as he understood it, the work was made in the manner of someone explaining it to a child. I was right there but treated as invisible.
I realised after a few of these encounters that I, and my sculpture, posed a threat to these men’s masculinity in some way. My work was attracting the attention of ‘their’ women and in order to retaliate they would have to take some kind of ownership of what was happening by explaining the work to the woman in the most technical fashion, removing it from the quasi-mystical realm of ‘artwork’ - revealing the magician’s trick, if you will. I also felt that this was a way of belittling me in some way, or the man proving to the woman that he was as clever or as capable as me and therefore reducing the threat I posed.
I should point out that I had no intention of challenging anyone’s masculinity or ‘stealing their woman’, it seemed to be a by-product of creating something in public. It created a threat to the most basic survival situation - the need to secure a mate for reproduction. I had unwittingly created an attractive trap which some men saw as a threat to that security. In order to ensure their survival they had to neutralise that threat, and being mainly civilised people this didn’t resort to trying to fight me (thank goodness) only to making sure that the woman still saw him as the superior choice due to his ability to know how the work was made, and therefore making me look less special.
The really depressing thing in all this is that these men felt (whether consciously or subconsciously) that they had to do such a thing, that they assumed that the women had no opinion, that they might not be able to understand and enjoy the work for themselves, and that they needed defending from the art in some way.
Dead Reckoning provoked a primal survival instinct in a small group of people, and I lived to tell the tale.