MY OLD FRIEND, THE RUSTY SCULPTURE
For those who don’t know, Liverpool Street Rail Station is a very busy large station in London, UK. For some reason I’ve just been thinking about the large rusty sculpture at one of the exits even thought I haven’t seen it for a long time. So everything I say here is based on hazy memories and my own feelings about it.
Basically, I love it. It’s a very tall piece of metal in the middle of a smallish square that’s surrounded by tall buildings. It’s about 3 storeys high. You have to pass the sculpture if you use that exit from the station but most people are rushing to work and simply don’t see it. I stopped close by it one day and looked up it. Instead of feeling like it was filling the square and making the place smaller I had a sense of freedom as it soared up towards the sky. This big heavy object in a small space didn’t feel big and heavy at all. It liberated the square. I stood there for some time just looking up. (…no idea what the people rushing passed must have thought!)
I was also struck by the patterns of rust on it. We often think of rust as something negative, but this rust was positive. What I saw was patterns produced by the weather, like rivulets of water. In one sense they were produced by rivulets of water and the whole pattern was like an estuary with many small streams all heading to the same place. The whole surface of the sculpture was a dynamic process closely reflecting some aspects of nature. So the sculpture changes with time in an almost organic way. Keep going back and see how an old friend has changed, has evolved. It reminds me of the time I met Keith Rowe, a leading pioneer of extended techniques on electric guitar. He told me of a time many years ago when he was living in a house in London where the kitchen sink overlooked the garden. This was a time before dishwashing machines in homes, so he spent a lot of time at the sink washing up. One day he decided to lean an old guitar against the garden fence where he could see it from the kitchen sink. So every day, whenever he was washing up the dishes, he could see the changes nature made to it through the seasons. It even snowed on it, changing its appearance quite dramatically into something else. The guitar was transformed into a dynamic sculpture.
This brings me to my final point… Art. I love looking at these things in the open air but I’m left cold by art galleries. Too much effort goes into isolating objects on walls etc and they lose a lot of valuable context. I know a lot of artists struggle to break this isolation in galleries but it still strikes me as a big problem. Is it even possible to stop it happening in a gallery? Even rooms given over to an installation still have the problem that, being in a gallery, they come across as too precious (they become ‘Art’ instead of ‘art’). I can understand that some people looking at them can get very excited about them and I feel like I’m missing out on something here. It would be great to find someone who will take me round to these events and just tell me what gets them so fired up. Obviously I don’t want to copy their experience. I would just listen and hopefully find something in what they say that would excite me about the event. Until then maybe I should find the time to go back and visit my old friend, the rusty sculpture, and see how he’s doing.
26 Nov 2011
andyhammondphd 