This blog documents the development of The Gates of Paradise, a project by Collaborative Space artists Jeni McConnell and Hannah Elizabeth Allan, commissioned by In Certain Places. They are two of five artists selected to create new artworks in response to the city of Preston, to be presented as part of the Guild celebrations in September 2012 – an historic event that takes place once every twenty years.
More information: http://www.incertainplaces.org
Performative lecture at Harris Museum and Gallery to an invited audience (and a rogue group of school children)
16th March 2012
Moving onwards
Passing others in close proximity
Bells overload the ears
Hammering echoing fluttering feathers as pigeons invade
Beggars blatant direct eye contact, standing directly in front of you
The silence of the bells and then a man starts the group laughing, they had approached during the bells. Appearing silent and quiet, around me
Voices are loud as the group listen
Attentive, captivated by his voice
This facade remained empty with stones . . . we call it the new gothic style . . . the most famous example is in London, the Parliament house
I am sorry to tell you these are copies . . . they were removed because of a terrible flood . . . this is the richest town with libraries, with museums . . . we have lost with the mud a thousand . . .
Grazie señor, the beggar wanders past, ignored, overlooked
It is part of our western civilisation . . . so we are at present very grateful . . . two of the ten panels were detached because of the violence of the water . . . and now they are in the Cathedral museum . . . and they portray the first ten episodes of the stories in the bible
A chuckle from his personal story added to the end of the talk, and the group moves on
Standing still, people filter past me. Spontaneous applause from a group on the steps catches the wandering people by surprise and for a fleeting moment all heads are turned in the same direction.
Sun still shading the space
A beggar approaches the tour guide. He is very clear; No, No. She chastises him and wanders away.
Music
A lady stands, hoping the space will remain between her and the camera held by her husband. Frustrated she huffs, ppphhfffff
A bike rattles by
And you wonder what holds it together
Field Notes.
Florence, June 2012
Cool quiet, dimly lit echoes through the space. Footsteps enter, on the verdegree tiled floor. Slow paces, doors and pews creaking under human weight. Deep green grey marble and cool blue white. Hushed tones, behind the rope. Back in time and space. The hushed aisles of youth, a grander ceiling. Plastic chairs stacked speaking of an administrative capacity. The turnstyle throws me through.
Archangels above circle crude symbols of the beasts. Relics of a time before, distant even to this ancient crafting. An earlier past.
Filtered light seeps through, halogen blinds.
Centuries of dirt of smoke of acrid scorching incense catching in same, different throats. No sign or line. Nothing of a modern, old age touches. Crisp cotton and lace, an uncertain, glaring concession to modernity.
Gilded saints gold reflects.
Trappings of power of wealth of the splendid Divine.
Lamb and rose and saint and beast.
Unknowable sign and signified.
The temporal shift behind these doors to another space, a third behind them all, outside beyond yet all. Watched over by these symbols, older even than the Saints, these stories. Mysterious and speaking of an older language even to these builders, their inscribers.
Behind testing knocking the mic
Music crackles
Through broken speakers
The connection bad
I try to look devout, failing
Remembering an inherited past, never here
The music stops, crackles, fails, tested.
In stops and starts.
Echoes and fills the space.
A sellable soundtrack to conversion.
Leans and stares, ear pressed to the cool mesh.
Neue Museum, Berlin.
Field Notes
Single footsteps, radio echos through the arched brick. Group enter with a low hum breaking the contemplative silence. Where one is looking adds to their interest. Photography a currency creating value. Low voices murmur and exclaim. Moving on the excitement, passing, a hive of activity consuming further, racing through to the contemporary.
Missing panel an eloquent admission to loss, to an absence. The narrative of panels a standard one, this could be anywhere.
Convinced I am in London. But the architecture of the journey – buildings of the German golden age, the centre of the world, the 19th Century. And the daring subtlety of this interior, a strange unfinished state between Roman ruins and the echos of conflict and abandoned schemes. Broken chunks of plaster carefully applied to walls and ceiling roses. New paint painstakingly chipped from wooden cladding. Appropriate. The building itself an exhibit. Action to progress, not forgetting, to a new world remembering its narrative.
Moving through quickly, suddenly more silhouetted staff, radios crackle. More visitors enter the space, looking where silent aides direct, each follow the same pattern. Hearing a story, pausing when instructed, appreciating an unlikely age and standard aesthetic of the old.
Paces echo through, slow and measured, on the marble floor. Leaning against the pillar, listening to that ever present guide – what if you want to linger here? A hundred years flit by. In ancient surroundings, it seems like nothing at all. Civilisations crumble and dwindle to dust. Great leaps made measured by this slow pacing. Those without guides move quicker, a race to modernity.
Where has the panel gone? Maybe that voice tells you. Or is it a standard story of names, dates, places. That doesn’t stick, the story of an object seems richer, more real, the physical journey of actual, not the referenced. The inferred narrative of a hazy other.
Turning away, dissappointed by the unrealness of this physical manifestation… it isn’t real. The looming object isn’t here, not real, not really. Its somewhere else, in Italy. Turning away, the original must be a sight, its the real thing, genuine article. Age is surely the point to this place, or else everything would be facade. Like the surrounding buildings, casts of grand Roman and Greek styles meshed together in an uncomfortable greyness. Yet, now these too are aged, reputation earned through the centuries and damage.
Everything borrowed, everything pastiche.
A missing panel telling more of an immediate past than any biblical referent. A history through damage, replicant, absence. Creation itself removed here. Time has no beginning now, only forever shifting. Another half heard mythology, a glimpsed object without context, becoming something else, not its sign. Another life, another creation story misplaced.
The edges become blurred and softened each copy, each coat of paint, spreading yet diluting a message, until the tipping point is reached, saturation. The likeness everywhere but none of the significance understood. Halls of objects instantly recognisable, equally unknowable. Signifiers of age in the impossibility to read.
Photographs of copies, further dilution. Moving away from a genuine product to something new again, something created from layers of meaning, implied value and referent status. The value in something being what it is. Not. The stand in, the place marker. Museums speculating. Obviously the real thing is in the genuine context. This is the cast, in the cast building, in the recast city. Experience the world and time in this sixty minute tour.
The beginning, the beginning. Lets forget it, quickly, erase it from memory. Just this cyclical notion of the replicant. Yet, it ages and deteriorates, this too. Decay written within each copy. No original context, the context is now. The creation myth, that of the workshop, swirls of unknowable chalk dust, air. This isn’t here anymore, but we can guess, approximate.
Photographs Florence, February, 2012
