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March 23, 2007
Of Clocks and Plasticine
One evening in July 1967, just after tea, my brother Richard came up the stairs to the attic, where I tended to lurk, making Airfix models, creating Great Works of Art and writing secret agent letters, to my secret agent friends, with secret codes AND grapefruit juice – ha! you weren’t about to find out our secrets. Mind you we sometimes couldn’t find them out either, grapefruit juice was not the most reliable of invisible inks.
Richard was carrying the local paper, the Holmfirth Express, and in his unstinting efforts to further my career as an artist, he had it open at an article about a new art exhibition in the civic hall, open to anyone. He suggested I enter. I can’t remember what his commission would be in the event of me being propelled to stardom, but I feel sure he would have had all that sort of thing covered.
And in what specific length of time is it usual for someone to be propelled to stardom? . . . Overnight.
Well, as it happens, I had just finished a brief exploration into the fundamental principles of Dadaism [honest], with the aid of my old Westclox alarm clock. It was a trick I'd learnt that week from Vision On. Tony Hart laid out slabs of Plasticine, in a Sixties we’re-all-having-fun-with-corduroy-and-cream-paint kind of abstract way. Then he stuck cogs and wheels into the Plasticine, and [and here’s the clever bit] he pushed bits of the cogs into the Plasticine to form patterns and the whole thing was then bathed in a stark BBC key-light which made it look far better than anything you could do at home.
But I was inspired and, with the dismembered workings of my clock, the assembled household stock of brown Plasticine, and a bit of hardboard from my father’s workshop, I had created another masterpiece. Sadly without the aid of the BBC lighting engineers my genius was in danger of going unnoticed.
Today the piece would be called something enigmatic and be described as a surface/non-surface dialectic creating a contradiction between the cog as signifier and the cog as activator forming a dialogue between the abstract concept of time passing and the concrete reality inherent in the clockwork itself.
I called it Whatever Happened to that Damned Alarm Clock? and described it as: Plasticine with cogs. Several years later, when I was helping set up one of the exhibitions, John Shaw, who ran the event for many years, said he remembered it in that first show. He gave a laugh, screwed up his eyes behind his round glasses, took a puff of his cheroot and nodded wisely. He never got one of my secret messages, but he knew art when he saw it.
Posted by john at March 23, 2007 10:34 PM