Friday, September 23, 2005

A Kind of Tempered Utopia

When I was younger, I hit upon a great scheme, which was for a kind of tempered utopia. The real estate market in the South of England, as all you Kent-dwellers will testify, has been stratospherically high for some time. While strivers paid over the odds for small boxes in proximity to London, whole swathes of property was left dormant in the North of the country. In particular, many of the old mining communities emptied out during Thatcher's reign, leaving whole streets to become decrepit, with individual houses on the market for four-figure sums, and never getting sold.

My plan was simple: myself, and say one hundered of my friends, would buy up a whole area of one of these former mining towns. Instead of working ex nihilo, or changing everything we found there, as most utopians want to, we would work with these run-down buildings. Those friends more practical myself would use devices like welding, or whatever practical people use, to transform them into interesting, urban dwelling-places. Instead of imposing our community on the space, we would look to interact with the former miners and unemployed that had chosen to remain in the area. If nothing else, we would rink with them in the pub, and so prevent the pubs from closing. We would record their stories on dictaphones.

The plan was foiled by my general skittishness, and the fact that I do not have one hundred friends, and no more than six who can raise even a four-figure sum. But I still liked, in my skittish way, to imagine the unrealised project as some sort of abstract ideal, possessing an untainted perfection.

Imagine my horror, therefore, when I discovered this week that a New York artist had conceived a much better variant of my plan, back in 1972.

Gordon Matta-Clark, who also has a much better name than me, was already an avant-garde pin-up, before his death in 1978 at the callow age of 35 meant he never had to try hard again. His artistic signature was the purchase of unwanted, near-unvalued scraps of land, sold off by the New York government. He called these scraps "gutterspaces", and they were intended as artworks in their own right, or else small art-galleries for the showing of new work. These spaces were mostly in Queens; some were probably bigger than hip underground galleries in Bethnal Green; some were almost inaccessible, and essentially fenced-off corridoors. The idea was that these pieces could be a calculated escape from the reality of, well, living in Queens; but also that you might accidentally trip over a piece of performance art, on your way to grab a Diet Coke, or beat up your wife.

There are many retorspectives of his work currently showing. They all, to a greater of lesser extent, miss the point of his art somewhat, being housed in static, coventional art galleries themselves. But the much-neglected link between art and the bus surfaces in the most interesting retrospective, where you can travel out to see how these "gutterspaces" have evolved through the years.

Some of the recent pieces designed to fill these spaces were moving, and my anger at seeing my wonderful idea plagiarised by a man who died before I was born subsided. As Matta-Clark languishes in obscurity in England - or perhaps I do not read enough, or rightly - I resolve to disinter my mining village plan, and bask in undeserved originality. All of you with four-figure sums to throw about, take out your maps of Gateshead. Let us build this community.

2 Comments:

At 3:19 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Rita Pushes Blogs, Rich Maps to Forefront
Hurricane Rita Pushes Blogs, Podcasts and Rich Maps to Forefront of Media's Efforts Ed Rappaport, deputy director of the National Hurricane Center, draws an arrow of projected path of Hurricane Rita as it ...
Hi, I was just blog surfing and found you! If you are interested, go see my child related site. It is special to me plus you may find something of interest.This has a great business opportunity as well

 
At 8:49 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

You've been pipped to the post again, old chap. The Independent on Saturday's Travel section has only today (24th Sept) published an 8 page guide to the arts in Newcastle and Gateshead. Ho hum.

 

Post a Comment

<< Home