A couple of people have noted that the photographs show my underlying obsession with OSB sterling board. The reconstituted wood sheeting we used to build Vincent Maugers huge Undercroft sculpture in the summer. It is a fabulous material and has a lot of possibilities, but I think that in this case it is purely coincidental. In these pictures I have been avoiding that kind of aesthetic choice. They are merely redundant cash machines, documented as simply as possible.
On Saturday we decided to take a tour of Brighton city centres glorious collection of cash machines, both operative and defunct. It was raining again. Despite this, and current economic instabilities, the shoppers were out in force. Any form of coherent on street discussion was limited, but checking out the queues and the fiscal activity was interesting. Some good cash machine stories came out. This particular machine was elected the slowest in the area. We withdrew some cash. It certainly was begrudging in its delivery, and seems to have some money stuck in it’s mechanism.
Early yesterday, rain lashing down, on my way to primp the exhibition before the first visitors I stopped off at my local cash machine to get some money, as you do. Scattered all over the pavement was soggy monopoly money, about sixty quids worth. Good luck for me, and for people out for a walk in the middle of an all night game of monopoly. A bad sign though for the government? Needless to say, the cash machine wasn't working, often the case on Saturday mornings.
Spent the past day putting the photographs up. Lower than you would hang pictures normally. It reminded of how in the Pompidou Centre the Malevich ‘Black Square’ painting is hung really high, about five metres up, where the heating ducts should be. It made me gasp out loud when I spotted it.
The irony of all this is that for the past few weeks I have had tennis elbow and can’t control the fingers very well on my right hand. So when a shop assistant asks me to type in my ‘four digit code’ and then turns away, I have to ask them to key in the numbers or risk making a mess of it using my left hand. This straightforward sale turns into a mass of niggly problems for the assistant, who can’t possibly know what the legal position on this is. Shopping etiquette.
Last week, I even had to ask the man behind me in the queue for the cash machine to type in my secret code. He wondered whether it was legal to do it.
