- Venue
- South Hill Park Arts Centre
- Location
- South East England
As we pass the threshold of the 21st century, equipped with evolving technologies dictating the nature of how we live and the direction of our futures, how often is there the debate on what dictates the nature of technology?
Our growing dependency on the rewards reaped from the structured order of the industrial age through to the new calculated efficiency of our high tech communications boom no longer considers technology as a convenience to the development our society or as an accessory to our individual lifestyles. Now it has been promoted with a responsibility for the well being of all those who submit to it.
Like sailing out to sea, towards the unknown destination of our ambitions, fuelled with the mechanism of progress, it seems that the firm resolution of history fades in the shrinking distance behind and below us. As we put increasing amounts of faith in the displacement of our growing abilities, we bob on the surface over a deep and treacherous world. Based on a misquote of the Italian Futurist Filippo Marinetti, “Goodbye Vile Earth” is in fact an aeronaughtical quote used as the title and metaphor for this exhibition. “Hoorah! No more contact with that vile Earth!” is the correct expression of Marinatti’s love for flight that lead him to see a future where humanity abandons the terra forma for a life permanently in the skies.
However, years after Marinetti’s romance with the future, the weighty concept of the present has brought the perpetual and yet abstract initiative to counter elements of this unknown, that is, “not necessarily the enemy,” as one gentleman states on a projection, “…the threat…the need to protect the UK from high flying bombers coming over the North Sea, whoever they were.”
A result of this mentality has been in the function of silent military complexes, in this case the Royal Aircraft Establishment (RAE) in Farnborough (founded 1918); once one of the most important aeronaughtical research centres in the world, secretly pioneering at the forefront of our defensive and civil technologies, now declassified through age to be revealed to the public it once protected, furthermore becoming a forum for these ideas within the art gallery context at South Hill Park’s Bracknell Gallery.
“Goodbye Vile Earth!” is the culmination of two collaborate artists, Simon Hollington and Kypros Kyprianou, after a 9 month residency at the Farnborough Air Science Trust Museum (FAST – originally RAE). Using the process of curation, the duo has orchestrated juxtaposition between a collection of various artefacts from our engineered history and the high art context of a contemporary gallery space in a bid to create a new dialogue between two foreign, yet significant elements of our cultural development.
On entry, the first thing that you sense is the muted atmosphere. The gallery is full but the noise that characterised their presence has been removed, creating a strange deafened inertia about the place. There are signs, photographs, and ambiguous looking mechanisms including a shred of what appears to be from a tail section of one fateful Concorde. Here we are surrounded by a cross section of the early detritus generated from the engineered dream to fly. What is significant about these objects is that these are the early prototypes, the crude embodiments of this dream; all present in essence, but bound to the dull weight of their physicality. Like in the raw clarity of an artist’s early sketch, they have a strange familiarity through our association with their refined offspring.
These were evolving conceptual structures, unrecognisable in any conventional context; these were secretly born in the image of feedback. Each object represents a step beyond its predecessor, a snapshot of the progressive narrative of the research process. They are not objects primarily recognised in the conventional sense of what they are, but for what they say (a practise more related to the fine art world than in the design of engineering).
Now aged beyond the relevance of their function in society, they have lost their voice, stored within containers in some unassuming ex-RAE land, inert, dry and without their reason-to-be.
Enter Hollington and Kyprianou…
Other than the background movement of their curatorial decision – making, there is very little evidence of the artists’ input at this point of the installation. Nothing here has been fabricated or created in response, nothing here is new as any simulation of secondary concept would give way to the authenticity of each object. Therefore, instead of competing with the weight of history to serve their own needs, Kyprianou and Hollington play with this, taking the language of each object as a building block to reorder and regroup associations into a child-like, almost surreal composition of props. This in turn diffuses the distraction of their conventional identity, allowing for a more flowing conceptual response. Once adjusted to their surroundings, using the compatible code of the art gallery context, the artefacts respond, and reset their identity as a basis of discourse of the modern human condition, bringing flesh to bone with a related process of (their) subjective evaluation.
There is more. To round this off there is a time-line pinned to the gallery walls that starts at the beginning of the C20th (the beginning of the RAE) made up of a mixture of documental texts and photographs from its archive. Accompanying this time-line is a consecutive collection of post-cards bought from galleries such as the Tate Modern and the Imperial War Museum portraying art works made in response to their subjective place in time. Quite aptly, this time-line wraps around the artefacts, containing them using that contrasting fabric of legitimate history. As each piece is married to the plaster walls, the art gallery context’s own physical boundary, compounded is the expression that recognizes the limits from which the code of artistic enquiry can operate from the outside conventional world; a mark that divides between the appropriation of subjective conceptual enquiry from primary evaluations of identity.
My only issue with this curatorial aspect, however, is that I feel it may have been more successful had the space been bigger or in this instance, the artists had managed to concentrate this idea further. As it stood, I felt that the limited proximity between the two contrasting elements of this exhibition caused a loss of resolution and blurred its features. With the explicit empirical nature of the time-line encroaching so heavily on the conceptual highlights of the objects’ playful composition, the clarity of the ideas risked being compromised creating a vague argument to a claustrophobic effect.
However all is not lost, this is of course my own perspective as a voice within the artist community. Though the fact is, the multifaceted rooting of this exhibition allows its conscious relationship with a spectrum of individuals from our society: the engineer through the mechanical design, the historian through its contextual sourcing or even the schoolboy through his own personal associations with a Firestreak or Red Top missile. It may be no coincidence that the location of this exhibition is where companies such as Ferranti Ltd and Sperrys once may have contributed to the development of the same family of these very objects and now gives way as a site for the UK’s Silicon Valley, an area of technological advance. This collection of artefacts, though once secret through its elitism was the culmination of our transparent infrastructure. The reason that we have this uncanny relationship with these unfamiliar objects is because they were derived through the geographical, social, historical and industrial demands that rang out from our society. And so at what point does the significance of this exhibition / residency end? Geographically? Socially? Historically? Industrially? This significance rings because the dictating factor that drives technology is derived through us and indicative of us. We are the engineers of technology. We are the researchers. We are the archivists.
After 9 months of getting to know the secretive archive of the RAE, Hollington and Kyprianou have acted as a chaperone in this reunion and have simply allowed it to take off.
