The Nature of Intervention - Nymans, 2012
Let us accept straightaway that Nymans is preserved in a way that renders it very different from how it
was when people lived here. It is not the business of the National Trust to
pretend that we are all invisible, and that the real inhabitants have gone out
for the day. As we walk round enjoying objects and views we may not see
ourselves in the space; but our presence is an intervention, and the nature of
the site as it is depends on our engagement with it. The positioning of new
artworks within a site like this disrupts our vision, putting us in a position
where we can acknowledge our own presence.
Nymans is a site which is about change; the destruction of one form on
the site has created space for a different form, a number of times, both
deliberately and through the agency of catastrophe. How do we read the removal
of the pre-nineteenth-century house, the extension of the Italianate villa, the
replacement of this with a medievalist building? How do we understand the burnt
part of the house beyond the locked door, which confounds our sense of space;
is it outside or inside, is it predominantly resentful, romantic, challenging,
anomalous or mournful? Do we read it as documentation of history, as a
reference to the Gothic, as a forlorn hope for reconstruction?
In this context, where the site is a palimpsest on which people and fire
have inscribed new identities for the building and its surroundings, proposing
different kinds of engagement, the insertion of works of intervention and
alteration is entirely appropriate. It is not only the house’s own identity,
but also the engagement and reactions to it by the former owners that invites
engagements and reactions from others.
Works made to engage with a site can enlighten, inform, critique,
outrage, delight and amuse; they can lead us to look at things and places in
new ways, and they can ask us to look at our own way of looking – even in
leading us to reject them they help us to confirm our own standpoint and
opinions. Making work that reacts to and is situated within a site of heritage
is bound to excite comment, often discomfort, annoyance and frustration. Both
as makers and viewers we should note these feelings, and use them as a space to
look at our expectations, to consider and note the relationships others have
with things and places that mean something to us.
My own work has involved taking things apart, undoing worked textiles
before I rework them; this is not preliminary to the work, it is part of the
work. Making work that involves a certain amount of destruction of ‘heritage’
material opens a door to many difficult questions. Having initiated the process
of alteration, can I complain if someone takes my work and alters it? – No, I
cannot. What gives me the right to change another’s work? – The same right with
which I change anything in the world. Does not presenting this kind of work
here run counter to the role of the host organisation as a custodian of
heritage for posterity? Art is in a position to ask new questions about how we
relate to the culture we operate in; we should not allow the concern that
things will not survive for posterity to prevent us from asking those questions
in the present. What about the cultural value of the thing I am altering? – The
intervention shifts its cultural value, inviting new ways of thinking about
both the item and the structure of cultural value surrounding it.
Destruction has a recognised place in contemporary art. In 1953 Robert
Rauschenberg was making work that involved erasing his own drawings; fascinated
at that time by the work of Willem de Kooning, he asked that artist for a work
that he could erase. De Kooning gave him a crayon and ink drawing; it took
Rauschenberg a month to almost completely remove all the marks, creating Erased De Kooning Drawing. In 1960 Jean
Tinguely’s Homage to New York
destroyed itself, as it was designed to do, and in 2001 Michael Landy destroyed
all 7226 of his belongings, including a Tinguely drawing, in the work Break Down. In 2003 the Chapman Brothers
exhibited Insult to Injury, a
‘rectification’ of Goya’s Disasters of
War etchings (1937 printing), the heads of the subjects being overdrawn
with the heads of puppies and clowns, in what Jonathan Jones described as ‘an
extension of his despair’. All of these works are reactions to something
already in existence, reactions that build upon that existence and create
something which was not there before. They are works which are wholly related
to the context of the material they developed from.
The irrevocable works just considered operate through a complex series
of actions and marks. In the case of my interventionist embroidery works made
for Nymans the undoing is irretrievable, but the marks made are infinitely
removable, like digital marks; the mark made is patently a committed
three-dimensional thing, the thread inserting itself through the ground, the
mark tying itself down. The act of
taking away, seen through the deliberately left marks of undoing, is a greater
irretrievability, a deliberate act marked by a trace, a mark of memory; the
unmaking is permanent, while the making is capable of being changed.
The works I have made for this exhibition are clearly specific to this
site, but the items I start with, having histories before they come to me, have
become sites themselves; as such the context of my working on them has to be
considered. There is no question of avoiding the issue of gender in this
medium. It is fundamental to the process that we should be aware that
embroidery in the West has traditionally been undertaken by women, and my
intervention as a named individual thus is a male intervention in a female
site. I am working with a clear knowledge of, and a clear reference to, the
embroidery school set up by Maud Messel, in which local girls were taught
embroidery, with the help of some of the housekeeping staff of Nymans. Given
the context of the work, the process of named intervention in embroidery here
turns works of ‘craft’ into works of ‘art’, explicitly authored, and with the
rights of authorship.
Yet, despite the anonymity of the
makers who originally created the objects I work on, the context of all of
these handmade embroideries is that they were once closely associated with
individuals, and mostly became family possessions. The process of becoming
commodities detached them from those associations, rendering them more able to
accommodate new stories, imagined, adapted, projected or transferred. In this
sense they are ‘rehoused’ into a new context of meaning; very domestic artworks
given a new home.
Each of these works must then be about loss, the loss of the previous
work or the loss of the empty clean space. The work I Don’t Want To Lose You, while referring to the medievalist
plaque, also relates to the loss of the work on the cushion, necessary to make
the new work just as much as it is about the history of loss within Nymans
itself, the desire not to lose the medieval, and the desire not to lose the
part of the house destroyed by fire. We carry the past around with us.
Ultimately these works open up a conversation with the role of the National
Trust, which alters the route towards entropy by preserving sites such as
Nymans, allowing the continuing questioning of how we see and know this aspect
of the world and of ourselves.
