Venue
The House
Location

Time is running out. This is especially true for a bungalow at Knipe Point in Scarborough, North Yorkshire. Coastal erosion means that a once desirable property which offers stunning views of Cayton Bay and the surrounding area, is doomed to collapse into the sea at any moment. But for landscape artist Kane Cunningham, this condemned house is an exciting opportunity. It is a symbol, a point at which a vast array of contemporary artistic, political and economic concerns converge. In Mr Cunningham’s words, it is “a stark reminder of lost dreams, financial disaster and threatening sea levels”. Worth over £150,000 just two years ago, it was sold for a mere £3000 to the artist, who plans to turn the site into an ongoing project for local artists, writers and musicians. Mr Cunningham himself intends to produce a series of paintings capturing the scene, and will be joined by other artists in constructing sculptures from broken parts of the house. He also plans to film its gradual destruction, hoping to capture the final sunrise before it inevitably falls into the sea below.

Rich in melancholy, the project evokes a sense of powerlessness in the face of inexorable natural forces, characteristic of 19th century landscape painters such as Turner. It reminds us of our constant struggle with the natural world, a struggle which motivated artists and writers of the romanticist era. Works of this period sought to unify the human faculties of imagination and language with nature. It was hoped that nothing would distinguish between an experience of the world and its representation in art. Wordsworth paradoxically wrote of “woods decaying, never to be decayed”, hoping to capture in language the chaos and confusion of an encounter with unpredictable natural elements. Turner’s paintings are dramatic, intense and as storm-like as their subjects. Swirling cyclonic brush strokes attack the canvas whilst doomed ships succumb to angry and tumultuous waves, with desperate survivors, barely visible, clutching to flotsam and jetsam. In romantic art, man is in the midst of nature. What these works seem to share is a recognition of unpredictability in the natural world. There is an awareness of the difficulty in representing the changeable tempers of nature within the neat structures of words and paint, bound by a page or canvas. Romantic art is melancholic because it struggles with a power greater than itself. Mr Cunningham speaks of his project as “a story of human misery”. This is the misery of unpredictable change, and our struggle to control or overcome it.

Change reminds us that things could always be different, and in ways we cannot predict. This is frightening because it suggests that there is no particular reason for us to be here; there is no necessity governing our lives. Yet, throughout history we have been compelled to invent a false sense of belonging. The existential thinker Jean-Paul Sartre talks about the freedom of choice which comes with consciousness and self-awareness. We’re often aware of more than one course of action, and are free to choose between them. The responsibility this carries with it is often incredibly daunting, as it suggests there is no necessary point to our being other than the choices we make. This frightening self-awareness leaves us vulnerable to change, as it strips us of any entitlement to existence; we could cease to be at any moment. In order to feel as though we belong, we often mask the responsibility of choice by turning to deterministic powers beyond ourselves; religion being the most obvious. Sartre calls this ‘bad faith’. Mr Cunningham’s doomed house embodies a variety of changes which have a serious global context, one of which being the threat of rising sea levels due to global warming, and another being the recent economic downturn. Its destruction is a direct result of the former, and the latter is implied by the massive reduction in the property’s value and the artist’s decision to pay with his credit card, which he claims is “a deliberate financial transaction suggesting the link to credit, financial markets, property speculation, boom and bust”. If we continue to fear change and act in bad faith, ignoring our freedom of choice and responsibility, these kinds of changes will continue to claim victims.

Artists of the romanticist era at least recognized the threat of change, but their attempt to capture it in their art was arguably done in bad faith. The attempt to imitate and mirror the fierce unpredictability of nature in art, bridging the gap between the world and its representation, is also an attempt to capture, control and understand it within the safe and limited boundaries of writing and painting. The German romantic poet Friedrich Hölderlin hoped that words would ‘originate like flowers’ and thereby perfectly express and embody nature. William Blake wanted to “see a world in a grain of sand”. By reducing the natural world to terms we can understand, the threat of genuine change is ignored. The contemporary critic and theorist Paul de Man suggests that objects in nature, such as flowers, exist on their own terms and can be understood and explained by themselves alone. On the other hand, words can only mean what they do by being part of a larger linguistic structure. They must fit in with an already established structure of communication in order to mean anything at all. Nature and the unpredictability that comes with its independence, cannot ever be perfectly translated into a language which forbids unpredictability and independence. The natural world is something we will always struggle to understand, and it is likely we will never see “a heaven in a wild flower”.

The installation at Knipe Point draws attention to change without reducing it to representation and undermining the threat it poses. Rather, it exemplifies and embodies this change. Much like Duchamp’s readymades, it is a found object; an artefact. It’s a performative piece which doesn’t seek to raise above the various issues it raises by way of representing them at a distance. It literally performs these issues, and brings an increasingly elitist and commercial artworld into the public domain. In doing so, people who would otherwise be disinterested are encouraged to participate. There is a real sense of urgency to the project, which will be obvious to anyone who is concerned about the very real issues of climate change and economic disaster. It reminds us that we cannot continue to fear change and hide our responsibilities behind the practice of bad faith. Mr Cunningham is keen to view the project as an ongoing collaborative site for creative practice and discussion. People have been invited to send letters on any subject to the artist, who will pin them up on one of the walls inside and which will be destroyed along with the house. It is this idea which has led to the project being referred to as The Last Post. Mr Cunningham also intends to arrange the various paintings, photographs and video footage which emerge from the project into an exhibition at Scarborough Art Gallery in October.


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