Open House

OPEN HOUSE - A series of exhibitions held at Sherborne House

PAST PERFECT
18th January - 16th February 2003

Why restore things? How does art obtain value? Two questions pertinent to Sherborne House, an 18c town house in need of restoration, running as a contemporary art venue.

The desire to restore something is driven by the dislike of the change that has occurred. To restore something is to value particular qualities and wish to see them represented. It is not solely an act of preservation, it acts creatively to communicate values. The decision to restore something requires a number of decisions be made. How do you want it to appear? Are you aiming to deceive or pretend? What materials or means are to be used in the restoration? Why do you want a restored thing as opposed to the original or a new thing? At what point do you decide to restore?

An ageing bridge is assessed to determine if it can function safely. The equation is function over risk and cost, and as art testifies, function is diverse and therefore judgements need to be made about a thing's function.

Is it it's story? Is it it's monetary worth? Many things are restored because of sentiment, emotion and attachment, all of which can be attributed functions.

Often restoration is aligned with conservation and is accused of an unwillingness to let go or to embrace change. Whose judgement should take precedence, the restorers or reformers? The judgement to divert funds to restore something is frequently made because the commercial gain will justify the costs. Is this argument enough? The debate concerning the conservation of the environment has taken many turns as the style and history of zoos and the building of the Eden centre testify. To restore requires artifice, to conserve requires protection.

On Radio 4, Melvyn Bragg recently discussed the Victorian realist novel. It was agreed, given that it is a contradiction in terms and having acknowledged that science is also a fiction, that fiction can communicate a reality, but whose and why? This acknowledges that the values are subjective and contextual. Self-promotion, fear and misunderstanding often play a part in alienating alternative values as if the point were to present only one viewpoint.

Sherborne House has made a conscious decision to restore the old and present the new. It includes both, and to conserve both requires a will established by the interests of those using it. To restore something, it surely must serve the present and it is the restored thing's function or meaning, like that of contemporary art, that raises many questions essential to awareness and improvement.

The Giottos in Assissi are being restored from dust and rubble at huge cost. Do we need the original dust to validate the restorer's art and to appreciate Giotto? Would they get as many visitors if it were built from scratch without the inclusion of the fragments but with the skill of the artisans on display in a remake, a likeness? At what point does it become a reproduction? These questions must also haunt the neurosurgeon faced with the changing character of a patient with decaying function or even in a coma, at what point is the soul lost? It is easy to dismiss the new or the old if you have no attachment to it and it is also hard to be realistic about the present when you are forever dreaming of change or are sentimental about the past. Risks and hope are necessary to progress.

All the artists in Past Perfect have made works that question the process of restoration; the way we educate and what we teach, the games we play for recreation, the status that materials take on when transformed, the things we are comfortable with. Our imaginations are provoked with ingenuity, humour and personal expression.

The essays by JJ Charlesworth and Andrew Stooke contribute to the subject with analytical insight and the poetic. JJ Charlesworth with the introduction of 'Groundhog Day' as an analogy presents the frustrations of those desiring change but feeling destined to face the repetition of the mechanics of life.

With reference to 'Momento' JJ Charlesworth acknowledges signifying memory as a way of coping in a changing world. Andrew Stooke introduces Von Hagen's 'Body Worlds' and draws our attention to death and whether it is the end. The proclamation that art is also dead is refuted by both authors with the recognition that art and its enquiry revitalises. Easter is coming...

I would like to thank: JJ Charlesworth for agreeing to write a piece for the catalogue and managing to fit it into his busy schedule; Andrew Stooke for his contribution to this subject and for Gallery Holt's involvement with Past Perfect. The partnership with Gallery Holt extends the boundaries of Sherborne House and Gallery Holt and gives a greater platform for the artists. Thank you also to Savage, Sonya Hanney, Adam Dade, Shrimpton and Bolas, and Paul McGowan for their enthusiasm and commitment to the exhibition.

Peter Dickinson
Curator, Open House

NEITHER GROUNDHOG DAY NOR 'ANTERIOR TIME'
JJ Charlesworth

The paradox of the past, of the historical, is that it is made up of what we choose to keep in existence in the present. If we could be truly objective about how the present becomes the past, it would mean being able recall every detail of every moment of the present that has fallen into history, a scenario that would allow the past and the present to become interchangeable. Time travel fantasies, from H.G. Wells's The Time Machine to Steven Spielberg's Back to the Future, take this imaginative leap as their stock-in-trade, representing the present as a single point on an eternal line of historical continuity. In this version of time, we experience the present as if standing on an infinitely long airport travelator, stretching from the past into the future. Permanently stuck on our own particular section of the travelator, we fantasise about stepping off, walking back or forward a little way, and getting on again. In this analogy, we want both the past and the future to be just like now, something we have omniscient and immediate access to, and it's no surprise that time travel fantasies obsess about how the past can be altered to change the present, the present altered to change the future. The desire to have total control over events and their consequences is the mirror image of our own more precarious relationship to the moment we live in, one which in real life is cut off from both past and future. A future we don't know until it arrives, obscure and unstoppable, and a past that slips out of our grasp, set in stone and irretrievable, and slowly to be forgotten.

The business of 'making history' is in real life a messier, contradictory and a more unstable business than our cultural imagination would like to admit. When we talk of 'making history' we really mean transforming the present so significantly that the changes will 'echo down through the ages'- that's to say, that we hope to see the evidence of the present-become-past in our own, ongoing present. But in practice, the making of history is rather more difficult. Like the protagonist of Memento, whose chronic amnesia forces him to cover his body in annotations to remind him of his own recent past, writing history is an uneven mixture of living memory, interpretation and, in the final instance, the excavation of the traces of the past in the objects of the present. Archaeology becomes the paradigmatic model for the historical, its literal processes becoming the metaphorical terms of all other history; 'uncovering that which was buried', 'bringing to light what was hidden in darkness', the incorruptible truth of the objects hidden, immobile in strata of earth and rock, so much so that we can say more about prehistoric natural history than we can about those societies whose artifacts have disappeared back into the earth.

But the re-creation of our historical past only becomes more complex as we get closer to it. Evaluation and interpretation are, however objectively conducted, always conducted on the terms of the present. History as a discipline has refined its awareness of its own subjective viewpoint, sensitive to how writing history can quickly slide into myth making, when the political and social pressures of the present force history to produce a version of events to suit their own interests. Whether it is Napoleon proclaiming himself emperor in the manner of ancient Rome, or the Nazis calling upon the 'history' of the Aryan race to justify the inhumanity of their political programme, or even our own contemporary fascination with 'heritage', and 'what it means to be British', the past is regularly invoked to provide authority for the state of the present, or expediently remodelled to suit the needs of the day.

Such processes also go to the core of how we go about defining what constitutes art. The making of the 'history of art', the definition of a continuous lineage of types of artifacts, from antiquity to the present, forms the foundation of the classical conception of art history. And although art is no longer the secure, well-defined set of objects and practices that classical, and subsequently modernist art history maintained, the conception of art continues to survive and thrive within contemporary culture. But if the idea remains, it is because the experience of modern art in the last half century has been a shifting of the terms of art away from a transcendent continuity from past into present, to a contiguous relationship with the other forms of culture that surround it in the here and now. Art's temporal homogeneity has given way to its spatial heterogeneity, and in so doing it has had to revise the terms of its definition in the past, as well as the present.

Such a transition is well established, and forms the substance of much of the critical debates that would concern art from the 1960s onwards. The dismantling of art's terms of aesthetic and cultural privilege in the period since, brings us to our present consideration of art as a set of possible actions taken in the present, rather than as the preservation of traditions that ensure its link to the authority and quality of the past. Yet it is worth pointing out that the far-ranging critical transformations and revisions that art has undergone in the last four decades are themselves quickly becoming historical. The transition from the modern to the post-modern, which for many years defined the terms of the present in opposition to what went before it, now finds itself as the primary form of defining that present. In an ironic nutshell, there is only so long that the post-modern can remain post-modern.

The subversion of the modernist narrative of historical continuity in art history is only one aspect of a broader change that has taken place in our relationship to the historical. When Francis Fukuyama famously declared that the end of the cold war marked the 'The end of History', he was suggesting a peculiarly new conception of historical change, quite different to the ones common in western thinking until then. History, understood as a process of change and development, of progressive improvement on what had gone before - such assumptions underpin the conception of human history since the enlightenment and, in its particular variations in art history, are also what ground a modernist account of artistic development, revision and purification on one hand, and avant-garde critical disruption on the other. That art should lead somewhere only makes sense in a society that acknowledges that historical change is potentially meaningful, that tomorrow does not have to be mere repetition of today.

Fukuyama's 'End of History' thesis was in a sense both affirmation and negation; on one hand he acknowledged that history could lead somewhere, but that whilst this might be the case, we had in fact now probably got there, and there was therefore nowhere else for history to go. Just as art has for a long time prioritized the spatial terms of its relationships to other aspects of the present, rather than its temporal relationship to its past and future, Fukuyama suggested that social change, limited as it was, should now only occur within the unchanging present of liberal democratic, free-market society.

But events don't stop simply because a theorist declares the end of history; nevertheless our relationship to the present is profoundly affected by what we expect to be able to accomplish in it. Whilst the 'Grand Narratives' of the modern epoch may have fallen out of favour to our post-modern present, they at least provided a compass by which to orient our present actions towards the future. Now, let's say, in the year 14 A.H. (after history), the reality of a present that leads nowhere is becoming increasingly hard to stomach. Like Bill Murray's character in the film Groundhog Day, condemned to wake up to the same day endlessly repeated, and whose actions make no difference to the relentless repetition that will take place the next morning, we try to act purposefully in a culture sceptical of big changes and progressive transformations. Contemporary debate about the future, one notices, is now set in those static terms of 'stability' and 'sustainability', rather than the dynamic, but outmoded terms of 'growth' and 'progress'.

So the historical trajectory of modernist art perhaps faltered with the realization that instead of participating in a historical period driven by change and opportunity, it was merely re-enacting a spectacle of historical progress. Whilst all around it this change had ground to a halt, or, as was the case with the boom years of the cold war era, appeared set on 'autopilot'. It would take another thirty years, with the end of the cold war, for this to be reproduced at the broadest level of debate epitomised by the 'End of History' thesis. And whilst the last decade has seen the steady revival of artistic and cultural practice that addresses the problems of the present, such developments have come up against the limits of a culture that no longer thinks of history as the representation of an ongoing process of transformation and improvement. For whilst there is no going back to the secure criteria of modernism to justify what is valuable in art, on the basis of categories rooted in historical continuity, art is nevertheless confronted by the problem of its identity in the present, once those certainties have been done away with. Just as it isn't possible to sustain the post-modern without the modern which frames it, so contemporary art that defines itself in terms of adjacent cultural practices can only do this if it continually refers back to a ghostly modernism that still defines a dysfunctional idea of art. Because if art is understood only as a particular set of institutional forms and critical practices in relation to the other forms of culture that surround it, it is always in danger of losing what it is that makes it different, culturally, from everything else: art about fashion, art about pop music, art about social issues, art about politics - none of these are bad in themselves, but artists who work in these situations fail to notice that the spatial relationships between art and everything else puts art in a secondary position to what it refers to, whilst effacing the potential of contemporary art as culture in its own right. One can see that contemporary art's temporal 'homelessness' - it's problematic relationship to its own past - is what currently drives it to refer itself to other forms of social and cultural practice - as is the case with much art directed at social and political questions - and also to endlessly repeat an obsessive fascination with the image of a bygone modernism - as is all too readily apparent in the resurgence of both 'abstract' and figurative painting and sculpture in recent years.

Such polarities suggest the deep antagonism that exists between art's spatial and temporal axes, its history in tense relationship to its present situation. This contradiction - between what art isn't any longer and what continues to make it different to other culture - is a symptom of art's unfinished struggle to reinvent the definition of its purpose, historically and socially: what we might define as art's agency. Because if modernism idealised history as an 'automatic' process, leading to continual refinement into an equally idealised future, our post-historical present, where we wake up to Groundhog Day each morning, only allows us to act on the spatial terrain offered by a continual present. It is a place where we never expect our actions today have any necessary effect on the one to come. But it is also one where we lose any sense of how our past relates to who we are today.

In grammar, what makes the Past Tense different to the Past Perfect is precisely this notion of historical continuity. If I say 'I have made art' it suggests that what the art I now make may be different, I still understand some continuity between the art of now and the art of the past, and between myself now and what I was. By contrast the phrase 'I had made art' suggests not only that I may no longer make it, but also that I may no longer be what I was at that time. The Past Perfect is sometimes also known as the 'Pluperfect', the 'past-in-the-past' or 'Anterior Time'. What these have in common is the sense that the past is shut off from us, always receding behind other already-historical events, 'perfect' because closed, complete and immovable. 'Anterior Time', in which the past no longer has a direct relationship to the present, Time before Time, the favoured tense of fiction and mythology.

The meaning we ascribe to things in the present is inevitably conditioned by how we value both the past and the present and art, ever since it became 'modern', has played across both these axes. To value the past as an immovable entity outside our agency led in art, as in society, to entropy, backwardness and reaction. But prioritizing the present without thinking about the progressive historical identity of that present, and our role in its creation, also produces similar symptoms of repetition and amnesia. Connecting the activity of the present to a narrative of both past and future means first rediscovering an art in which forcing progressive change, whether through innovation or disruption, is based on the belief that culture, and society, is worth changing, and can be qualitatively better than that which already exists. Without this, art can at best only function critically towards its own moment, without offering anything to take us beyond it. For contemporary art, the problem now turns on how to act on present culture in order to create something new out of it tomorrow; the solution to this lies in part in reconnecting with a historical past that often seems 'perfect', cut-off, dead. By realizing that the living desire to transform the present into something more than itself, is what allows us to 'make history' into an ongoing, dynamic present. Recreating the cultural agency of art is what takes us beyond both Groundhog Day and 'Anterior Time'.

JJ Charlesworth

Paul McGowan
Statement

My interests lie within urban and domestic life. I concentrate on the relationship we involve ourselves in each time we switch on the television, pick up a newspaper or simply walk down a street. Always questioning pre-conceived notions of how we are supposed to live. The work cannot be interpreted as exclusively political or socially critical.

I accept the importance of aesthetic values as well as the conceptual content within the work, considering the way they work together. Within the corruption and subversion of form and function the work challenges the situations that are inherited by all of us at birth.

Shrimpton & Bolas
Shrimpton & Bolas set out to question our current obsession for preservation and re-creation of an idealised past. Arguing that today's poor aesthetic and quality standards, can only achieve a short-term vision, which is plaguing today's society.

Shrimpton & Bolas set out to confront modern society's obsession with transient fad objects, believing it is still possible and relevant to create objects of timeless beauty and permanence.

Shrimpton & Bolas are the architects of the work, and are proud to credit the execution of this show to a team of researchers, skilled artisan craftsmen and technical specialists, mixing forsaken skills with modern methodology.

Shrimpton & Bolas do not recognise any hierarchy within the art and will not place one form of expression above another (God made the original chair and we are proud to sit in it).

For this installation, Shrimpton & Bolas have traced the history and inventory of a particular room in the building. This room was originally designated the 'best parlour' and it was the principal dining room of Sherborne House. When the house became a school in the early 20th century, most of the original features and character of the room were lost. The current interior design fashion is to deny the natural evolution of architectural spaces by restoring rooms to a museum-like 'historic' appearance. The installation for 'PAST PERFECT' will question this.

Shrimpton & Bolas have been looking for a suitable site to stage a show which will explore and juxtapose the values and preoccupations of the conservation, antique and contemporary art industries.

Shrimpton & Bolas will comment on the shift in concerns from the seeking of perfection to the cheap alternatives that we expect in todays society.

Shrimpton & Bolas are a team that consists of a skilled artisan restorer and a contemporary artist and will uniquely reinterpret the features of this room. We are concentrating on the core sensibilities of the room, juxtaposing the historical value of the room with the material language of today. Time will be kicked around across value, material and visual language barriers, leaving the room with a new character, subverting, reflecting and combining aspects of its history.

P.P.
Andrew Stooke

A mummy again endued with animation could not be so hideous as that wretch. I had gazed on him while unfinished; he was ugly then; but when those muscles and joints were rendered capable of motion, it became a thing such as even Dante could not have conceived.
Mary Shelly

Only at the conclusion of a thing can we see it in its entirety. Restoration corrects the parts that were never seen intact. Great historical projects are forged in the bronze of memory and imagination. Such a project is Walter Benjamin's 'Passage-werk' (Arcades Project). At the end there was only a mass of fragments, the meagre fibres of a great work, 'pure montage', woven from the juxtaposition of quotations; as Adorno commented, the theory springs from it without having been inserted as interpretation.

'I have more memories than if I had lived a Thousand years,
A chest of drawers littered with balance sheets...
I am an old Boudoir with faded roses. And tangled heaps of clothes now out of date...'

The contemporary gaze is often a distracted glance at the endless stream of visions. Any idea of authenticity is compromised, by reference not to a distant past but to a modern recreation of the past. The gaze discovers, the crystal of the total event in the analysis of small particular moments. Aspects and details receive attention; they are stacked up so high - toppling.

The Arcades Project suggests the end of shared experience and documents the move to a municipal life. The individual's experience of progressing through history is arrested. The progress of the individual comes to rest and history itself accelerates: the world is in motion without the impetus of human agency. In this great shift of momentum - the civil world itself moves, the structures of the past, formed by human interaction, wobble and disappear beneath ruins - in the modern period history was moving and we were like oaks. The collection that is Benjamin's unfinished work has since been restored to be the complete work, long and lovingly rebuilt, all the tiny strands re-found and brought together as the whole that never was, now as a publishing project.

'Cursed, cursed creator! Why did I live? Why, in that instant, did I not extinguish the spark of existence which you had so wantonly bestowed? I know not; despair had not yet taken possession of me; my feelings were those of rage and revenge. I could with pleasure have destroyed the cottage and its inhabitants, and have glutted myself with their shrieks and misery.'

In fulfilment of Benjamin's speculation the body too is now a site where, bit by bit, a subject can be completed, brought to a halt, to exist in his or her entirety in the swiftly changing kaleidoscope of spectatorship - of history. Professor Gunther von Hagen claims, I can give back the holistic view of anatomy... that you can study the entirety of the body. Of course, that you can visually craft it, that it is not in fluid anymore, it is colourful, and it is not smelly. We have preserved this kind of feeling that it's always better to see the real thing. The real thing here is, of course, exactly how it is, not exactly how it was.

The figures in von Hagen's Body Worlds exhibition epitomise the body, they are the body, they do not represent the body. Everything is intact and in its place, only the pain of death, of parting, is lost. The figures pose with dynamic gestures that would have been hard to sustain when they were mortal. The poses have been restored to the human subject from the ideal, unchanging, immortal, world of art. Here the restoration or 'plastination' process asks no questions of the subject's personal history. It creeps through the body, it stops the organs of the standing figure from squashing up in the lower abdomen, it allows it to collect dust forever - well not quite for ever, these items are not as durable as the human flesh they once were. As von Hagen says 'Why shouldn't we have more opportunities after death?'

Who, I'

It's me -

Hello you -

Where are you?

I'm on the train, its been a complete swirling fuck-up. Vans have been reversing - jerking into tight bays slamming it on full lock, obtuse, coming at me full on - against my babbling flow. I'll tell you, I thought I'd lost it, missed it completely, stopping on for the 10.40. Not so bad now though, got the tread hard down.

So, where the hell are you?

Slowing like a siding now, and their flashing - all cars white, then metallics, copper, silver, graphite grey, even a kind of mauve, like a vapour - there running much faster than this hot metal.

Turnips, I'd say, but mainly potatoes - drilled absolutely in, up to their necks, under lowering graphite grey, like a vapour, drivin' down faster than the railways.

Artists visiting arrive by train and see Sherborne Abbey as they approach the town centre. Afterwards a great fire occurred, said to have been caused by a parishioner, this may perhaps have necessitated more rebuilding than had originally been contemplated. As the flames lick the stone it turns from the golden ochre, that seeps through the buildings of the town, to a bruised rose; the intense heat melts the gold and melts the lead.

Behind the Abbey a school and in the school a space called HOLT - commemorating Holt: not Holt in the space, but space for Holt, this space a part of his body world. No good looking for bright plastic organs here, only the heart is present in dimensions, air and lightness. This is the Holt where the mind is not choked by the real fragments of a life but arrested one powerful tendril in the imagination, as tenacious as the attraction of a killer squid stretching out in the dark ocean for an atomic sub.

It's a quick stroll from the station; the fresh air comes upon them clean and silent after, any refreshments? on the train. Their journey preserved in hot water. The sealed windows are dusted with sepia, like the coffee dust, destined for the corners of the interior. Travelling through always in the interior, of the office, of the telephone - the PC.

Where do you go with them, artists looking for the landmarks of restoration, when the walls themselves trace the contours of stone work rebuilt, made good - from not so bad to good? So you go to lunch in a timber hall, the wood breathing in the foods that have left a thick accretion on them like marmite, their footfalls butter and mash.

Before, when this hall was a gym, it was the body heat of young athletes that built up the fug, the fat that clung to the walls and hung like a vapour high in the space, like a railway shed. Now that space is a black prism above a suspended ceiling. There are now, needless to say, plans to remove this upper plane, with its grid of fibrous grey boards spaced out with aluminium strips and to un-hide the original vault.

The artists sample the air like food. Hungrily they sniff the food and reveal that they too were once in a refectory such as this in a school somewhere, sometime - the food is freshly recalled.

Feet continuously trample. Trays pass over our heads in a horizontal plane maintained at chest height; above the remnants of their meal, below digestion already squeezing through the abdomen. Here growing young people carry it all before them, completion is a long way off and they fear restoration as they suspiciously sample the choices served. They eat quickly and move on while the artists stretch out, stabbing their feet in the accretions under the table, stirring with their forks the food above.

On this occasion no one had seconds and they hesitated to know what to do with the trays. At the end they are correctly slotted into the steel framed trolleys waiting at the exit, in a stack. Later all the uneaten food will be scraped off before the plates are washed ready for tea; the wasted food must make a big heap!

It probably took less time than we expected to look around, our tread on uneven flags, views glimpsed through tiny diamonds of glass, the walls turbulent in the old glass. The grey light lies smooth on waxed surfaces and stumbles over carved graffiti. Some words are themselves choked with polish. Terribly old - unfamiliar names, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Jeff Beck, and Roxy Music, reflect our age.

Maurice Blanchot has said, If quotations, in their fragmenting force, destroy in advance the texts from which they are not only severed but which they exalt till these texts become nothing but severance, then the fragment without a text, or any context, is radically unquotable. As we look around we seek details, small neglected spaces, alterations in the fabric, looking out the old beyond the new.

Alongside HOLT there is a large hall, a proscenium stage to the south end faced with tiered seating and a further tiered balcony above; all the accoutrements of a full theatre. Down the centre of the room there is a row of stately brass chandeliers, too high to polish. The floor is oak and the walls are lined with oak panels. Edward VI full length, the surface pockmarked and bituminous, hangs among portraits high on the walls. There are people in this town who remember when this entire space was the other way around, the stage to the north, the position of the audience swung through 180 degrees. In the space today there is no evidence of this monumental reversal. Glancing behind, as we cross the road to return to the gallery, I realise that outside a broad stone stair takes a darker turn as it rises to a mere casement. Through the leaded glass I can see the limbs of a few members of an audience, knees and elbows orientated towards an ensemble on the stage. I from behind catch a few notes, always unfinished works. . .

'Plastination is a kind of consolation in that it changes the face of death.' he added.

Andrew Stooke
Art Director, Sherborne School

Click on images to enlarge.