©Tamor Kriwaczek
With thanks to
Carlos Fry, Günter Hoffman, and LIBERART
for their help and support.
Dedicated to the memories of Arnold Tuppley and Marco Chillds
Contents
Introduction
Art or the Artist?
Recipe: The Weisse Cube
What if art fails?
Recipe: Blood Bed
How can you define art?
Recipe: Genuine Art by Mr. J.J. Gill
What is art worth?
Recipe: The Value of Art
How can art explore time?
Recipe: 11:04am
How can art explore space?
Recipe: Definition:Space
How can art explore itself?
Recipe: Feedback Curve
How does the artist see how the public see their art?
Recipe: Never Seen
Can Anything be art?
Recipe: Machine (Confession)
What is the true power of art?
Recipe: Air
Final words
The art recipe, as we now know it, owes its existence to the rare talent and traumatic life of Arnold Tuppley. It was Arnold Tuppley who reduced conceptual art to a simple set of instruction for anyone to follow without losing any of its artistic merit, and who alongside Marco Chillds created LIBERART to disseminate those works, the initial catalogue of which came from the notebooks Tuppley diligently maintained, and which I had the privilege of studying before they were handed over to the police.
We will not be looking at the life of Arnold Tuppley himself, many of the details of which you are no doubt aware of through the salacious reporting that surrounded his death – no, that is for another time. What we shall examine is some of the most important questions that art has to answer through the recipes Tuppley collected, which not only serve to elucidate the true remit of art, but also to follow the thinking of the man whose efforts helped redefine the art-world, and whom we can thank for the many works of art that are even now being re-created across the world, for new audiences, and new generations. Of course, in some cases that necessarily means delving into the troubled months before he died, the deaths of the Weisse twins, and the murder of Zara Friese, but only insofar as they pertain to the works themselves.
Some of the recipes he created himself it would not be appropriate to print, such as his legendary Bad Egg, highly toxic but beautiful, which should you be fool enough to eat would certainly kill you; or his last recipe of all, The Artist and The Damned, which drew his life to a dramatic, and public, conclusion. But I hope these omissions and the troubles he experienced don’t overtake the importance of his role in proliferating the art recipe as an exciting and powerful format, which is a legacy that any one of us, leading a full, long, and happy life, would be proud of, and is indeed a fitting epitaph for the self-denied artist – Arnold Tuppley.
What’s more important, the art, or the artist? You might think the answer obvious, since the art lives on after the artist’s death; but then again, if it wasn’t for the artist, there would be no art in the first place. Some have grappled with this question through exhaustive discourse, which, of course, is largely a waste of time. But the question will always be asked, and once in a while, an interesting answer is attempted by artists who are put in a position where their very existence as an artist is at stake. That is the position Addi and Werner Weisse found themselves in, and as far as Addi Weisse was concerned, there was only one way to find out: fight!
Arnold Tuppley was in Berlin at the time as a guest of Günter Hoffman, staying with the Weisse twins in the flat that Hoffman paid for. He grew used to their constant arguing which only abated during brief periods of intense concentration when they were working on some new idea or hopeful project. But on one particular night their familiar argument took on a new viciousness in their little flat near the centre of Berlin.
Addi’s relationship with Werner had always been close, but from an early age it was clear that Werner had all the talent to make things, to bring to life thoughts and ideas that otherwise would have remained stuck in the limbo of Addi’s mind, whose fingers were simply not as adept at transferring visions into reality. Addi’s lack of ability in making the works he conceived, having to rely on his brother’s practical nature, imbued in him a lack of self confidence, a feeling that in some way he was only half an artist, which Werner was well aware of.
Arnold Tuppley had been out exploring the city, and returned to find the twins mid-argument, with a friend of Addi’s, Zara Friese, sitting on the sofa making little headway in engaging either of the two in a different conversation. The argument continued as Tuppley took a seat next to Zara, bringing in specific cases and animosities which came to the surface, lubricated by cheap beer, until after another assault by Addi, Werner, the older of the two by minutes, cruelly fought back again, claiming his brother had done nothing but ride on his coat tails his entire life.
Their flat was a half finished open plan studio, with rough bricks broken where two rooms had been knocked together. Werner was in the small kitchen area while Addi was pacing and shouting from the other side of the flat, goading his brother over and over again that he had no ideas of his own, and far from riding on anyone’s coat tails he was the only real artist in the family. Werner screamed abuse back at him and, grabbing a knife that lay on the worktop next to him, threw it towards Addi. It missed, by a long way, but the shock to both of them from the transformation of violent argument to violent attack was apparent as Addi, suddenly sick with fright, ran from the flat, followed soon after by an ashen Werner.
Arnold Tuppley and Zara Friese were left in the twins’ flat, alone. Though the argument had been in German, Tuppley had heard it enough times to have gathered what they were on about, and with Zara translating into faultless English, Tuppley was left in no doubt as to what was going on between the two brothers.
Tuppley had met Zara a couple of times before at bars with the twins. Addi was obviously attracted to her, but despite Zara rejecting his advances they still got on well as friends, and Tuppley too found her good company to be with. After Addi and Werner had both walked out, they too decided to leave and headed off to Zara’s place, not far from where the twins lived.
The following day the twins had made up, as they always did, and Addi went to Zara’s flat to apologise for them both. But the twins’ relationship had clearly taken a knock, and later that day and into the evening in a bar with Günter Hoffman, Zara Friese, and Arnold Tuppley, the argument continued.
This time it was rather restrained, each trying to make their point more politely and with more consideration than usual, but there was an atmosphere building, with both making vein attempts at recruiting their friends to their own particular side of the argument. They all knew what had happened in the flat, and so no one wanted to get involved. A silence settled between them after they had exhausted all possibilities of gaining any external support, then Addi left the bar with a sour look on his face.
They were, of course, rather poor, as struggling young artist are wont to be, and maintained their less than luxurious lifestyle by working for Hoffman to hang shows and help with their promotion – in short, doing whatever Hoffman asked of them. They had come to the attention of Hoffman following their rather nihilistic installation “Entfremdung” (Alienation), which had the effect of alienating the brothers almost entirely from the artistic establishment of Berlin, while providing Hoffman the opportunity to take two, young, imaginative artists under his wing. Hoffman paid their rent, and if they had even a slightly interesting idea for art they wanted to make, he would willingly pay for the materials, and if it looked promising would put it in a show, or even set one up especially.
So when Addi returned to the bar that evening just before it closed, he brought back with him an idea, a complete work of art, a concept that would, in essence, challenge Werner to an artistic fight that would define the difference between the twins and prove once and for all that either they were nothing without each other, or that from now on they must work apart.
He could have had no idea at the time that in fact what he brought back with him that evening was their deaths. Addi’s plan was to construct a room, a cube, 3.5 metres or so along each side, which was set down into the floor of a much larger space, open at the top, much like a pit, with no visible escape route; it was a trap, literally and metaphorically. Werner would be let down into the cube in the morning via a ladder which was then removed, and the public invited in to freely provide Werner with whatever art materials they chose, or food, or abuse – whatever they wanted. Werner’s task was then to create art with what he was given within the eighteen days that the event would last for. Each morning he would descend, and each evening emerge, but during the day there was no way out, and no option but to work.
What Addi had done by putting Werner into this forced space was to cleverly turn his own brother into a work of art by making him the artist observed, the idea of an artist, exposed to the public to gawp at and throw tit-bits down to and watch, like a lion feeding, as Werner tried to challenge the supremacy of the event by creating art that was more important than the concept of the artist.
Günter Hoffman loved the idea and enthusiastically provided an empty warehouse for the event, all the scaffolding and boarding materials, and the publicity required to ensure the public’s participation, but it was clearly an unfair fight from the start; Werner was a sacrificial victim to Addi’s ego, and whether Werner liked it or not, it was such an audacious plan, such a brilliant idea, that he had no choice but to agree, bated into a trap that there was no way out of.
The show started well.
The crowds gathered and threw down so many things to Werner that every evening he had to sift the rubbish from what he could usefully use so as to not completely fill the space. There were those who enthusiastically provided him with materials he requested, and those who came to abuse him in the absence of his brother, claiming that together they had degraded the very idea of art.
A security guard had been employed by Hoffman to keep the public away from the edge of the cube to stop them falling in since Addi was categorical that there should be no visible barrier. But in the end the guard was more usefully employed in keeping away those who talked incessantly at Werner, making it almost impossible for him to concentrate on his work.
Tuppley, who had moved in with Zara after the knife throwing incident which had unexpectedly brought them together as more than just friends, kept Werner company during some of the quieter days, while Addi kept his distance, resisting the temptation to openly goad his brother.
By the seventh day Werner thought he was getting somewhere with the work he was producing that would be displayed publicly inside the cube as the conclusion to the event. Sadly, however, a conclusion was never to come. Sometime in the early afternoon on the eighth day the fire broke out.
Günter Hoffman had insisted on a secret door being installed in the wall of the cube that Werner knew about but could not be seen by the public. It led under the false floor that surrounded the cube straight to an exit from the warehouse in case of just such an emergency.
There were only a couple of people milling about when the explosion happened. Something in the pile of offerings thrown down to Werner had caught fire and blown up, throwing Werner across the cube, knocking him out when his head hit the hard concrete floor. By the time the security guard had got down into the cube the smoke was already thick from the intense fire. As he tried to drag Werner to safety through the forest of scaffold poles under the false floor, smoke was sucked in with them. They never made it.
Their path became obscured as they were enveloped by the thick smoke, which in the end killed them both.
The next day Addi went missing.
This is an event that requires the cooperation of the public to make it work. The white cube set down into the floor of the space is the focus for the event, where an artist is interred and supplied with materials and equipment by the public. The artist’s job is then to produce work with those materials. The quality of the work produced should challenge the supremacy of the event itself, which must last exactly eighteen days. After that, an exhibition is held in the cube itself to display the works the artist has created for the public to judge for themselves which side has won.
MATERIALS
• 1 warehouse or similar space, at least 900 sq ft, with a ceiling of at least 5m
• scaffolding
• plywood or similar boarding materials
• 20 litres white emulsion paint for the cube, the platform can be painted or not as you wish
• 1 artist
• 1 ladder
• 1 hidden door in the side of the cube
• 1 emergency exit
• 1 noose
• 1 security guard
• publicity
STEP-BY-STEP
1.
Find a suitable venue and measure your artist’s height.
A large space is required for this piece, preferably a warehouse or some other such structure with a high ceiling of five or more metres. You need to ensure that there is enough room to build within the space a raised platform that is twice the artist’s height, or 3.44m (twice Werner’s height and the height of the original cube), whichever is the greater.
2.
Build the false floor with the cube as a hole in its centre going down to the real floor below.
Within the space erect the floor with scaffolding and plywood to the height calculated above. Stairs should take the visitor straight up to this level from the entrance to the space so that they are unaware of the real floor below them until they come to the central hole, the reason for their visit, which should be located as near as possible to the very centre of the room. At this centre, the hole goes down to the floor below, as wide and long as it is deep, a cube, whose internal walls should be painted white. There should be no discernable point of entry or exit from the cube, but there must be a hidden door, one that the artist is aware of but which cannot be seen by the public, that leads to an escape route from the building in case of an emergency, should one arise, and an optional toilet.
Along the top edge of the cube the minimum of protective cordons, fences, or warnings, should be put up to allow for local health and safety laws, the ideal being nothing at all. Any cordon or barrier should not be visible from within the cube at the natural eye level of the participating artist so that their view is solely the white walls of the cube and then the ceiling, with no interference. At the same time the visitor to the piece should be able to look down and observe the artist, and be able to throw down to them equipment or materials.
The raised floor can be painted any colour you like, or not at all.
3.
Employ a security guard for the duration of the event.
A security guard must be employed to watch over the artist, and to make sure no untoward behaviour is experienced by the artist from members of the public. If necessary they can help the public to throw down the things they have brought, or to stop them throwing things at the artist directly. They must also keep note of the artist’s behaviour to ensure they do not spend their time hiding under the false floor or overusing the facilities provided, or in any other way trying to shirk their responsibility as an artist, otherwise the piece will be rendered null and void. In this way, the security guard acts as watchman and invigilator for the piece.
4.
Publicise the event.
Care must be taken to ensure sufficient publicity has been arranged to avoid the prospect of the artist sitting in the cube with absolutely nothing to do. It is the responsibility of the organisers to ensure the public are aware of the event and of the role they have to play to make it work.
5.
Hang a noose from the scaffolding under the platform near the cube on the morning of the first day.
It has become a rather macabre tradition to hang a noose from the scaffolding under the false floor in memory of Addi Weisse, the author of the piece, during a solemn ceremony that remembers both brothers. This should be carried out on the first morning of the event, with all those involved in its re-creation descending down into the cube, lighting two candles in remembrance, and then entering the space beneath the raised floor through the hidden door where a noose is hung from the scaffolding. When this ceremony is complete, everyone returns to the cube, and each exits, ascending the ladder, leaving the artist on their own. The ladder is withdrawn, and the artist blows out the candles signifying the start of the event.
6.
Use a ladder to help the Artist gain access down into the cube every morning, and to ascend every evening, for a continuous period of eighteen days.
The artist should be interned at 10am on every morning, having the ladder withdrawn, and exiting at least 8 hours later. This pattern is repeated every day for eighteen consecutive days. They enter with nothing except for the clothes they stand up in, and an optional two litre bottle of drinking water.
Once the event has started the public are allowed to come in and throw down into the cube tools, materials, equipment, anything they think appropriate with which the artist can then make art. The artist’s task is then to produce art whose veracity and quality must surpass the spectacle of the event.
7.
After the eighteenth day, build a staircase down from the edge of the cube to its floor, and prepare it for exhibition.
The conclusion to the event is reached after the eighteenth day has finished. The following day all debris must be removed form the cube, and a staircase built down to its floor for the public to gain access easily. An exhibition should then be set up in the cube of the work that the artist has produced during their time in the cube, a private view held, and then the exhibition opened to the public to visit for a period of one week.
Before we get onto other questions about the importance of the artist, and the way art can be used, it is worth considering this very important point: what if art fails? Artists have routinely used their art to exorcise those tortuous trials that artists are forced to go through, whether because of the temperament that has made them become an artist in the first place, or because of circumstances that they have thrust upon them. But what if art is found wanting? What if its very purpose has been found unable to cope with the questions it is being asked to answer?
That is a position art found itself in a few weeks after Arnold Tuppley returned to London, when he attempted to express the trauma he suffered only three days after the fire that killed Werner Weisse, and only hours after Addi Weisse was found hanged, when he returned to Zara Friese’s flat to tell her the news that her friend had committed suicide, and he discovered her corpse, hacked to pieces and laid out on her blood soaked bed as if a butcher’s block. With Blood Bed Tuppley tries to circumvent the inability of art to adequately explain or express the horror and emotion surrounding those tortuous days in Germany, and so, when nuance and interpretation were found wanting, the only course of action left open to him was a more literal re-creation of the scene he was a witness to – excepting the corpse.
The story of how Blood Bed was made initially came from Carla Friedrich, who in turn told it to Carlos Fry, Arnold’s closest friend. Following his discovery of Zara Friese’s body, his mind shut down. Thereafter, try as he might, he simply could not remember the moment he found her, his mind had simply shut off that part of his memory, an amnesia that had a great impact on his art and his life as he pushed himself ever harder to find the memories he had lost.
Tuppley had been drinking heavily for several days, trying in vain to remember what happened, literally banging his head against the workbench in his studio to force his memories to jog back into position to the point where his forehead was bruised and bloody. It was some time in the early morning long before sunrise. He still hadn’t come up with a work for the show and it was opening that night. Blinded by drink, Tuppley left the studio and headed to a nearby spot where rubbish was regularly dumped, and where he knew there was an old bed frame, a child’s bed frame, and an accompanying mattress. Taking his life in his hands he drove there, piled everything onto the roof of his car and drove back to the studio.
He didn’t really have a fixed plan in his mind, but he knew the bed was important, there was a memory there, somewhere, something to do with the bed. At some point before he left to take the bed to the exhibition space, he decided to mix up a concoction of rabbit skin glue size with different red pigments to create the gelatinous viscous liquid that would play the part of the blood, the blood he now knew he had seen. That was the main memory that came back to him that night, the huge amount of blood that drowned the scene he found. But there was no Aha! moment when suddenly part of his broken memory returned, but as he tried to think what to make, and tried to remember what he had seen, the two coalesced into what he knew to be true.
He had been told there was a space waiting for him at the gallery and that the manager would be there by 10am. He was tired and drunk, but reasoned to himself that driving slowly in the rush hour was probably the safest way to go. So, by 9am he was loading up his car again and soon was heading, slowly, down to Islington to take his place in the show. On the way, stuck in traffic on the Holloway Road, he passed a charity shop with a bin bag outside, its contents spilled open all over the pavement. Amongst the objects, he spotted a cuddly toy, a killer whale, the significance of which we still do not know.
The traffic was at a standstill so Tuppley jumped out of his car and grabbed the toy.
When he arrived at the gallery, he unloaded and with difficulty dragged the bed frame and the mattress into the gallery. The manager at the time, a young woman called Kerry Lane, was witness to Tuppley’s efforts. He refused her help, and so stood by and watched, somewhat perplexed at the bed he was heaving into the building.
He pushed the bed against the wall in the space he had been given and placed the mattress on it, then disappeared back out to his car returning moments later with the large plastic bottle of fake blood, and the killer whale toy. He told Carla that he didn’t have a plan at all, that he just acted on impulse with the things he had with him. To the horror of Miss Lane, that impulse led him to proceed with his creation by pouring the entire contents of the bottle, all eight pints of blood, over the mattress, soaking his shoes and trousers as it splashed and spilt onto the floor, pooling in great circles of dark sticky red.
He took the killer whale toy, dipped its head in the blood, stood back, and threw it at the wall above the bed leaving it to land where it would, then left, inadvertently leaving a trail of bloody footprints behind him.
That was the sight that greeted everyone as they entered the show that evening, and that was what everyone talked about as the night went on.
All apart from Tuppley himself saw the bloody footprints. He hadn’t noticed when he made them, and refused to enter the show, or to collect the work when it was over. In fact he never talked about it again, except in respect of the fact that that was when he realised he really was no longer an artist, but a maker of artefacts, artefacts of his own life, whether or not they held any interest for anybody else.
It was sold by Hoffman to a Dutch collector, but Tuppley would not have anything further to do with what he had made, so in the end the decision was reached that Tuppley would write down a full and accurate description of how to re-create the work; in short, he had to write down the recipe.
There would be little point in an artist attempting this piece as a re-creation imagining that they would have any personal input or any stake in it artistically. This is a pure re-creative piece whose expression of pain and anguish will only ever be that of Arnold Tuppley’s.
MATERIALS
• 1 metal bed frame and mattress to fit
• 300g rabbit skin glue size
• 50g Alizarin Crimson powdered pigment (PR83 or PR83:1)
• 10g cadmium red powdered pigment (PR108)
• 1 good pinch of Ivory Black powdered pigment (PBk9)
• 500ml cold water
• 3.5l boiling water
• 1 stuffed killer whale cuddly toy
STEP-BY-STEP
1.
Find an old metal bed frame and mattress to fit, or buy them.
For this recipe, the structured focus is supplied by the bed. It is still possible to find an old rusty metal bed frame in a skip, or on the side of the road. Council run estates are also a good place to look as tenants often leave their large pieces of rubbish out for the caretakers to deal with. You can of course buy a new one but then you must be sure to distress it adequately, using wire wool to remove any surface lacquers etc. The mattress may also be easily found on the street, but be sure to get one that fits the frame.
2.
Leave the bed frame and mattress outside for at least 2 months.
Wherever you get the bed frame and mattress from, leave them outside exposed to the weather for at least two months before installing the work. This process of de-personalisation and re-personalisation destroys the previous life of the materials and makes them anew as your own, since all that has gone before in the life of the objects becomes overrun by the abuse and lack of care you submit them to. The cuddly toy need not be exposed to the elements.
A week before the work is to be exhibited bring all the objects in to allow them to dry out adequately.
3.
Mix the rabbit skin glue crystals with the cold water and leave overnight.
The blood is clearly one of the most important aspects of the work and its creation must be attended to with great care. The day before set-up, carefully mix the rabbit skin glue crystals in cold water and leave overnight.
4.
Pour boiled water onto the soaked rabbit skin glue crystals.
The following morning, preferably once the bed is ready but it can be done up to an hour before hand, pour in the hot water and mix thoroughly until all the crystals have melted. You will probably have to do it in batches. If you have problems with getting all the crystals to melt, you can use a traditional double boiler to maintain the heat, or use a microwave.
5.
Mix the pigments and rabbit skin glue.
In a bowl, mix all the pigments together first to create a homogenous colour, taking suitable precautions due to the toxic nature of cadmium red, then add a little of the rabbit skin glue until incorporated, then add a little more and so on until you have a soup of blood coloured liquid that may only be a little thicker than the glue on its own. Be aware during this process that as the glue cools, it becomes thicker. Then pour back the coloured glue into the rest of the glue and mix thoroughly.
6.
Place the bed frame with mattress in position against the wall, and pour on the blood.
The bed must be placed against a wall, since the wall plays a significant part in the piece. You should also ensure that there is sufficient space around the piece so as not to disturb any other works that are displayed nearby. Pour the blood liberally over the bed, making sure to create one or two pools of liquid that then cascade onto the floor.
7.
Throw the toy at the wall and leave.
Take the cuddly toy, dip its head in the red liquid and retreat a few steps, having made sure to get the blood on your shoes, generating within yourself a feeling of desperate sadness and anger. When the first tears start to fall from your eyes, throw the whale at the wall above the bed with all the power of the emotions you are feeling, and walk out of the gallery, leaving bloody footprints as you go. If the toy lands on the floor, just pick it up and chuck it on the bed without thought as you leave.
The definition of art is riddled with problems, but the most interesting attempts at answering this question is to be found in the art produced by those who have little interest in actually finding an answer, but instead are simply pushing the envelop to see what really can be achieved.
It was in fact only a short period of time during which the question of what art actually was came to be a subject worthy of study, until the answer came there none, and everyone swiftly moved on, hoping only to create objects that were liked, or that made people ‘think’ – though what they ‘thought’ wasn’t particularly important. And once artists cottoned on to the fact that presenting more or less anything that wasn’t expected necessarily made people think, art became the bizarre, the unlikely, or the confusing.
Of course, in more recent times, this led to the idea of using shock or surprise or spectacle, so that someone seeing the art would be jogged into a new thought, thus making the spurious connection between a ‘new’ thought and ‘new’ art. But it did at least relieve the public from pretending they understood the art they were looking at since there was usually little in the art to understand.
The modus of these forms of art is to make the observer do the work, to do the thinking, and thus superimpose their idea of what art is onto the objects they are a witness to; therefore, if you don’t understand the ‘art’, it’s your fault, not the artist’s. This idea quickly replaced any notion of what art may or may not be, the responsibility having been placed firmly out of the hands of the artist, pushing the very idea of art so far back into the cultural subconscious as to render it obsolete as a concept, since all that is required is that everyone can take something away from the art for themselves, reflecting their own ideas rather than the artist’s. But in previous years questions were still being asked and elegant conclusions looked for.
As Tuppley was asking these questions of himself he came upon Genuine Art, that even now still defines the position that an artist holds in modern society, and arguably even more so with the advent of celebrity as a career option. John John Gill was one of a group of artists at a time when the concept of what was, or was not art, was raging, with each artist trying to outdo each other. They used film and found objects, the everyday and extremely rare, reproductions, juxtapositions, jokes, and thought experiments designed to create ephemeral art that didn’t exist in time or space.
Many of these pieces were easily constructed by others as a kit supplied by the artist with a certificate of authentication. Gill, who had been witness to all this but had made little impact himself, also created his own versions of pre-designed certificated art of canvases with areas clearly marked for painting with colours the buyer had to mix themselves. But on receiving one or two complaints (and only one or two sales) because of what he described as “the inability of people to follow simple instructions”, he decided to supply works with the colours pre-mixed. These he described as ‘prefabricated’ works, and were simpler.
Instead of creating a decent abstract form, which could then be used as the design for the art, Gill reasoned that if they couldn’t be bothered to mix their own colours, then he couldn’t be bothered to create an image for them. So in the kit, he would supply rather vague instructions to draw a series of squares, rectangles, or circles, leaving the buyer to fill in the shapes with the supplied colours as they liked. The impression one gets when faced with a Gill kit is that he had lost interest in the idea of art all but completely, until you see the certificate.
His certificates were beautiful hand drawn celebrations, illustrated with white and yellow gold leaf, turquoise, vermilion, cobalt violet, and black. The decoration was an endless symphony to its own importance, all surrounding a few words of explanation and at last, right at the bottom, his signature.
Steadily, the artworks themselves became simpler and simpler, the last true kit being to paint a canvas of any size or shape, divided vertically in two, each half with a different shade of black, until he finally reached the conclusion that the art object was validated by the presence of the certificate, and the certificate was validated by the signature of the artist, which itself was validated by the presence of the art. And so the inevitable conclusion was reached: the certificate itself becoming art, object, and authentication in one. This was a step away from his contemporaries who were still agonising over the validity of their craft, and hadn’t realised that to validate something as art, all they had to do, as an artist, was to sign it.
But Gill was on a downward spiral. Instead of working on his certificates, seeing them for the real art they exhibited, and which still sell well today when they occasionally come up for auction, they became less and less ornamented, and less and less saleable.
He had almost given up his battle with art, contemplating teaching or pig farming as alternatives according to his friends, but was asked to contribute a piece for a new show called ‘The Art of Art’.
He went to his local framers, bought a cheap frame and mounted in it a single piece of white paper, 8.5 by 12 inches, which stated: ‘I, an Artist, hereby certify that this is Genuine Art by Mr. J. J. Gill.” And as if to reassure the public by demonstrating the artist suffering for their art, he wrote the whole thing using his blood as ink. It caused quite a stir at the private view, both for it’s simplicity, and its audacity, and sold to a collector for a little over $8,000. Overnight his star rose to heights he could not have imagined, with other collectors eager to get their hands on a genuine Gill. He produced a number of them, each written in blood, each numbered, but none illustrated or illuminated as his earlier certificates had been.
Gill thought he had found his metier as his production and sales increased for a very brief period. But as they became simpler, and simpler – “Art J.J. Gill”, “Art JJ”, “Art” – long after interest in him and his certificates had waned, they had become scraps of paper with nothing more than a bloody smudge from his thumb.
His behaviour had become erratic, and soon he found himself homeless, occasionally proffering a bloody piece of paper as payment for food or drink. Eventually he lost his friends and his family until, penniless, and living on the streets, he disappeared.
The essence of this piece is the veracity with which it is carried out by using your own blood to write your signature, stating for all the world to see that you believe in yourself as an artist so much that you are willing to bleed yourself for it.
MATERIALS
• 1 glazed frame
• paper
• scalpel
• nib pen
• cup or other small vessel
STEP-BY-STEP
1.
Collect your own blood.
You do not need much blood for writing out the certificate, about twenty drops should do it. A good place to make a small cut in your skin is you earlobe. Make a small nick with the scalpel and squeeze, collecting the blood in a the cup. You could also go to a private doctor and ask to have some blood taken that you can then use, but this would cost you a lot of money for something that can quite easily be done at home.
2.
Write out the certificate.
Once you have your blood, write out the certificate using the nib pen, stating in your own words that you are an artist and that it is “Genuine Art”.
3.
Sign, date, and number the certificate.
Make sure you sign, date and number the certificate clearly. It is vitally important to note that if you are not an artist the certificate is fraudulent, and you could be sued for misrepresentation, although many have argued that given the fact that the certificate is a work of art, whoever has written it is, ipso facto, an artist.
4.
Frame the certificate.
When the blood has dried, mount and frame the certificate. J. J. Gill himself used as plain a frame as he could afford. But it is now accepted that presentation can bring a lot more to the work than just keeping it from getting damaged. To this end, it is now common practice to use a high quality frame that draws attention to the work as being something of value and importance. Many a lesser work of art has been well mounted and seen thereafter as something worthy of note and so it is important not to let a situation arise where a poorly executed smear of paint or pencil is somehow considered to have more merit than the overtly honest and candid account that you have given.
There is much to value in art vis-à-vis culture and its impact on society. These are questions that the artist wrestles with daily to produce their art, and must be laid to rest once the work is finished. They are personal questions for the artist, and at the same time more general for the wider population who are asked to experience the art rather than make it. But the one question that is usually at the forefront of the artist’s mind, once the work is complete, is: how much is it worth?
When Blood Bed first went on show, Tuppley attended, but refused to enter the gallery that was scene to a re-creation of the terrible moment he found Zara Friese. He stayed outside the gallery, and met there an American artist called Marco Chillds who also had a piece on show, and was intrigued by Tuppley’s idea of the recipe as a format for art.
They started to correspond and swap recipes one of which was a work that had originally been made by a German artist in the 1920’s, and which Marco Chillds was intent on re-creating himself. It is piece which looks specifically at how art’s value can be measured. The Value of Art was based on a story Chillds had been told by an old drunk he met in a bar in Greenwich Village, New York, who claimed to have known Marcel Duchamp in the 1920s, and another artist whose real name he would not reveal, calling him only “Jay”.
The veracity of the story, however, has to be measured against the fact that the man who told it would have been over one hundred years old when Chillds met him, which Chillds clearly did not think was the case. But research has shown that an artist called Joseph Henri fits the description that Chillds was given, and that there is some truth in the details of the story. But we must also remember Chillds’ ability to weave out of the merest thread of truth a fine cloth of unparalleled beauty, and so I will relate here the story as understood by Tuppley through the prism of Chilld’s mind.
It was in 1923 that Henri exhibited Kunst (Art). He had been an unknown and not particularly good follower of cubism, but his skills were such that he became adept at creating ‘copies’ or fakes, under the influence of his brother Felix. Even less is known about Felix Henri. It is known that he had a vegetable delivery business which claimed to bring in fresh produce from out of town, but that seemed only to be a front. People that had known him at the time, and who were interviewed some years after the event, claimed that he had deep connections within organised crime and was heavily involved in gun smuggling.
It may be that the whole scenario had been a set-up from the start, an opportunity too good to miss by Felix and his criminal associates, or possibly it was a genuine attempt at a Duchamp ready-made-aided, as Joseph Henri claimed. But either way it was a break from his painting that saw his fortunes change radically and earned him an unenviable place in art history.
It is not known by what process Henri came up with the idea for his work, but his comment on the state of art, a state which has been maintained through the decades to remain just as relevant today, has to be remarked on as prescient if nothing else.
Kunst played with the notion, first espoused by Duchamp, that the deification of the artist had overtaken the value of art. The only interesting point to examine therefore, was what the value of art actually was. Henri decided there was no better way to do this than to place it in direct confrontation with the one thing globally recognised as having value, something to covet, something to long for, to work for, to kill for, something sought by Kings and Queens, something that was buried with Pharaohs and Emperors in prehistory for thousands of years, the ultimate statement of wealth and status: gold.
He used 5-tola Rothschild gold bars. The tola is an old Indian weight of only 11.66 grams, and these tiny but valuable ingots were of a type that had rounded edges for ease of concealment within the body, a method favoured by smugglers many years ago. They are small, one-inch square by one-quarter inch thick, and are a rare item now. No one really knows how Henri managed to get hold of forty-eight of these ingots for his piece, given their rarity and value which, due to hyperinflation raging in Germany in the 1920’s, was over 150,000,000,000,000 Mk each. But it is possible, or even likely given the company he was keeping, that their smuggling heritage played a part in their emergence at this time.
Henri arranged them six wide by eight high on a simple hessian background, as if a portrait of art itself, mounted in as cheap a frame as you could hope to find. This was then securely attached to the wall where they were going on show as ‘art’ rather than gold. Above the frame of shiny yellow metal squares was a typed strip of paper showing the total price of the bullion, a price he updated every morning with the previous nights closing price from the commodities exchange. Attached to the frame with a piece of string was a hand written price tag for the artwork as a whole. The thesis he put forward by way of explanation at the time was that art had been “subjugated by its value”, and he aimed to question that relationship by stating the “transitory natures of art and money”, and colliding these ephemeral concepts to produce an outcome to trounce them all.
Alongside the gold in the gallery sat a middle aged man, Aimon Tanss, a wounded and formerly destitute first world war veteran who walked with a stick and had a long scar right across the side of his face where it had been ripped apart by an exploding shell case, and then sewn back together again. He was employed to guard the gold, and for him, this job was a step up. It provided him with a little money, and a rented room not far from the premises so he no longer had to live on the febrile streets of the Weimar Republic, begging for scraps of food.
On the third day of the exhibition, in circumstances that changed every time Tanss was asked to recount them, thieves raided the gallery in broad daylight, and stole the gold, worth in today’s money about £100,000. There was not much surprise that the theft was attempted, though the ease with which they gained their prize, coupled with Tanss’ ever changing story of what actually happened, drew rather less suspicion than one would imagine, and inspired a distinct lack of interest from the local police.
What is clear is that on the morning of the raid the art dealer and owner of the premises, Ramon Kalkman, left Tanss on his own for a business meeting somewhere out of town, and when he returned, the gold had gone, and Tanss was found in the back of the building, apparently, but not convincingly, tied up.
A search of the premises and of Tanss’ rented room was made, and Tanss was questioned a number of times, but there were no leads, and the whole story went quiet.
A week later, and again, in circumstances that are not fully known, Tanss’ room was raided by one of the many nationalist militia that were present at the time throughout Germany. Aimon Tanss was found dead on the floor in a fresh pool of blood. Another search was quickly made and the gold was found hidden in his mattress.
The official view at the time was that Tanss had been full of remorse after stealing the gold and fabricating the story of the raid, and so shot himself in the head, twice. But there was no explanation as to why the gold had not been found during the first search of his room.
Once the gold was recovered, the militia ordered it to be returned, and employed a local man to courier it back to the gallery, immediately, hidden amongst the produce in his vegetable truck. The courier left with the gold, and even though the gallery was less than 10 minutes walk away, he didn’t turn up until over an hour later. The courier, whose identity is still not known, was unable to account for his whereabouts during that time, other than to say that he thought he was being followed, and so took a few detours. But the gold had been delivered, seemingly intact, and so no further questions were asked.
The courier, who it turned out was not local at all and indeed no one had ever seen him before the day he took the gold, vanished as if he had only ever been a figment of their imagination. But the gold was re-secured to the wall with the price of the art displaying a doubling in its value due to the notoriety the work had gained.
The following day, in an unconnected attack on the piece by a French painter who despised the da-da movement, the display was damaged and the gallery was immediately closed. It never reopened and Kunst was quickly sold to a private collector. Its current whereabouts are unknown.
Joseph Henri went missing two weeks later after a particularly hedonistic night to celebrate the sale, again. He had been making a habit of throwing his money around while claiming to have redefined art by making himself rich, and was not averse to fuelling the flames of curiosity that surrounded the whole theft and recovery of the gold, not to mention its quick sale to parties unknown. His links to criminal gangs and political violence also became more evident as he celebrated his success with little regard for the possible consequences, and when Ramon Kalkman also disappeared, supposedly emigrating to America in a hurry, fresh rumours started to circulate.
Chillds’ informant in Greenwich Village was convinced that it was a conspiracy from the start, that Joseph Henri and his brother Felix, had come up with the idea, raising money from Felix’ contacts, and persuading Ramon Kalkman to let them use his business as the front. The plan was to fake the theft of the gold, doubling its value when it was recovered, and then sell it at a large profit to a collector. The police were paid off and Aimon Tanss was employed as a smoke screen, ostensibly to help prevent any attempt at theft and yet allow the theft by the criminals that supplied the gold in the first place. But Tanss probably asked for a bigger cut, inadvertently presenting the criminals with an ideal opportunity to scapegoat him, thus providing a route for the gold to be returned with no further questions being asked.
But something happened that caused the closure of the gallery immediately after the attack by the French painter. The old man thought there was a subplot. He was convinced that someone inside had got greedy, and had wanted to swap the real gold for fakes in order to double their money again, but that whoever it was had failed to do it in time and so paid the courier to take the gold to them and make the exchange before finally delivering his consignment to the gallery. When the Frenchman knocked them off the wall, Ramon Kalkman could clearly see the gold scratched away revealing the lead underneath and in a panic closed the gallery. The old man would not be drawn on whether he thought he did indeed emigrate to America, but he was adamant that the ‘work of art’ with the fakes was sold on the same day that Kalkman left.
In the weeks that followed, Joseph Henri threw a lot of money around, and the possibility that he may give away the truth behind the raid through his excessive spending, drinking, and his loud mouth, was clearly too much of a risk and so he was also disposed of. Parts of his body were found floating in the Kaiser-Wilhelm Kanal, now the Kiel Canal, some 50 miles from his home town of Hamburg. Felix Henri was never heard from again.
Marco Chillds had been intent on recreating Kunst ever since he heard the story. He realised he had no hope of raising enough money to pay for forty-eight 5-tola gold bars, but eventually tracked down one original Rothschild 5-tola bar which he bought for around $2500, borrowing a little money here and there, and came over to London where he was going to exhibit it.
According to Fry, Tuppley was not very impressed with the little yellow square of gold, and suggested making replicas, better to re-create Henri’s original piece, especially since there was no evidence that the gold Henri used was in fact real in the first place. But Chillds was adamant that it had to be real gold on show.
It was unusual for Chillds to care so much about the truth of the object, where one would imagine that the overall concept of the piece would be much higher up the agenda for him than whether or not the gold was real, but clearly, his fascination with its re-creation was much more about the gold itself, that lump of yellow metal that has held sway over men’s hearts from time immemorial, which now seemed to have caught Chillds in its grip, causing him not only to seek out a genuine Rothschild ingot, but to refuse to sacrifice the purity of the single bar he had managed to get hold of for the wider point that the work was trying to make.
The presentation Chillds chose was also slightly different form Henri’s work. He bought a much more fancy frame to house the gold and to help give the impression of value it was housed inside a larger toughened-glass case, which was secured to the wall for display by four very large and conspicuous bolts that were, as far as Tuppley was concerned, far more impressive as objects than the gold.
Above the glass case there was a cheap dot-matrix display linked to a hidden laptop computer. Aligned to the bottom and right of the case was the title label, which showed the price of the work as a whole. The computer was connected to the internet and the constantly fluctuating price of gold which was monitored by specially written software that took that price, and deducted it from the price of the work, thus calculating the value of art which changed minute by minute and was displayed, as a scrolling ticker tape price, on the dot-matrix display. Beside the whole thing sat a security guard called Ralph, employed especially for the week long event.
Tuppley thought the whole thing looked rather cheap in the end, which may have been a more accurate re-presentation of Henri’s work than Chillds had anticipated. Henri’s piece was riddled with questions about what really happened, and whether or not there was any gold there at all, and if there was, where was it now? Chillds’ version, though true and honest vis-à-vis the gold itself, fell down somewhat when he admitted to Tuppley that since he hadn’t actually sold the work yet, and that ‘art’ only had a monetary value once someone had parted with some cash for it, the value of art on display was going to be anything but true.
In the end, in order to maintain the fragile truth within the piece, Chillds arranged for it to be sold to a consortium of three, the gallery owner, a friend of the gallery owner, and himself. This little loop hole enabled Chillds to justify the value of art displayed, even though he was left somewhat out of pocket by the transaction.
Here we will deal with a variant of the recipe for Chillds’ re-creation rather than the original by Henri, which lacked any aesthetic focus, though one could argue that given the idea of the piece was clearly for the gold to be stolen, displaying it without thought for security or its presentation was at least an honest account, as true to itself as any work of art could be.
To truly recreate this piece as the concept behind it is intended it should be sold before it is put on display. To assume a price, however reasonable, is something of a falsehood, since it is not a price anyone has yet paid. In those circumstances, the only valid price to present is the price paid for the gold. This price can be used, but might result in artistic negative equity if the price of gold goes down, resulting in the value of art being less than nothing. But this too could be regarded as valid comment on the art-world and the role money has to play in people’s perceptions of what is, or is not, art.
A more recent development also includes putting the work up for sale on an online auction site at the same time that it is on show. Thus, the value of ‘art’ presented by the dot-matrix display can change not only due to the value of the bullion going up and down throughout the day, but also because of the auction price as the bids come in throughout the time of the exhibition, and at least comes half way to solving the problem of displaying a value for the art that has not yet been sold.
MATERIALS
• 1-48 Rothschild 5-tola gold bullion bars
• MDF or plywood cut to size
• hessian
• hot-melt glue gun
• picture frame
• toughened glass case
• 4 x 24M nuts and bolts, at least 10cm longer than the depth of the bullet proof case
• dot-matrix display
• laptop or other computer with internet connection
• computer programmer
• title and price label (if using)
• 1 security guard
STEP-BY-STEP
1.
Find one or more genuine Rothschild 5-tola gold bars.
It has become mandatory to use at least one Rothschild 5-tola gold bar for this piece, the difficulty in finding them simply adding to the idea of the search for truth in art. And to increase this difficulty, since the spotlight has been shone on the Rothschild gold, the price of those particular bars has risen to a premium which outweighs their bullion value by nearly 30%, thus providing a demonstration of the lengths people will go to in order to accumulate wealth through art.
2.
If making copies for exhibition, make a mould from your bullion and cast the required number.
The number of bars displayed can vary from one, as Chillds’ original re-creation had it, to the forty-eight that Joseph Henri used, though that is never likely to happen again. Indeed, even now there is speculation that most, if not all of the bars used by Joseph Henri were fakes right from the start. Given the undeniable vagary of the facts surrounding Henri’s exhibit, it is now seen as perfectly acceptable to make a mould from your gold bar, or bars, in order to make a number of unique replicas by adding the odd scratch or extra mark as part of the process to individualise the pseudo bullion, before having them plated in 24ct gold.
3.
Mount the bars on hessian covered MDF or plywood with hot-melt glue, and frame.
Once you have your gold, work out their positioning and the size of the background needed. This is completely up to you and has no bearing on the piece. Cut out a piece of plywood or MDF to the required size, and glue the hessian onto its surface, being sure to glue the entire surface, as the combined weight of multiple bars, even though each one weighs very little, could drag the hessian down causing it to sag. Once the board is prepared, the gold can be simply glued onto the hessian. You can do this with an animal glue, as Henri did, but nowadays the simplest and most effective way of doing so without damaging the gold in any way, is to use a hot-melt glue gun, as demonstrated by Chillds.
The frame, again, is a choice for you, but it is advisable to create as much a sense of awe and wonder as possible through the presentation of the piece. The framed gold is then attached to the wall as any frame might be, awaiting the glass case.
4.
Secure the framed gold to the wall, and mount the glass case over the top.
The toughened glass case will have to be made to order and must be at least 24cm deep and open at the back. It must also be larger than the frame by 10cm or more on every side to accommodate the 24M bolts through holes in the front pane which are secured into the wall with the nuts on the outside of the case. This may seem an obvious weakness, clearly pointing to an easy way to remove the case and therefore the gold, but the purpose of the case is to re-enforce the value of the article within, rather than to protect it. The security guard sitting next to the work as well as the security of the venue should be enough to prevent any theft without relying on the obfuscation of artistic design to do the job for you.
5.
Secure the dot-matrix display above the case.
The dot-matrix display and interface necessary to connect it to a computer are easily available. Presenting the price of ‘art’, that being the price of the work itself minus the ever changing value of the bullion as it changes throughout the day, and with the possibility of using an on-line auction site to sell the work as it is being displayed thus changing the base price of the piece, is a little more complex. So if you are not comfortable with programming computers you may require some assistance from someone who is.
6.
Affix the title label to the wall alongside the piece.
If using an online auction during the exhibition the base price of the piece need not be displayed at all. Otherwise, it should be displayed alongside the title label, and should be clear and easy to read without drawing undue attention, which otherwise may seem presumptive or even arrogant. Subtlety is the key here, not forgetting that it is every bit as much part of the art as the gold itself.
7.
Place a chair next to the work for your security guard.
The security guard should be dressed in a suitable uniform, and sat next to the work at all times.
Art’s ability to examine situations, events, thoughts and feelings, is extraordinary. It seems that art, in the right hands, has almost limitless possibilities in being able to approach any question you may wish to ask. But those questions usually rely on some external impetus, a starting point from which art can extrapolate its unerring conclusions from the thing that caused it to be created in the first place. But what if we go back to basics, cut aside the need for any personal participation in this or that event, relying on things happening at this or that time, and simply ask, as we watch the hours tick by, how can we explore time itself?
Amongst the works that Arnold Tuppley catalogued in his notebooks were a number of recipes from the randomist movement, which he seemed to have a special fascination for and wrote in some detail about the neo-tonalists, the randomists, and the Art Wars between them. But we will take a briefer approach, laying bare the essential facts before looking at the archetypal work 11:04am by Leyland Johns, which is still one of the most popular and important works available on LIBERART.
The Art Wars were an unedifying chapter in art history pitting the neo-tonalists against the randomists in a slanging match, which not only showed the artists involved in a rather bad light, but ultimately led to seventeen deaths.
To put the events into context it is worth remembering where the neo-tonalists came from. The original tonalist movement was a small clique who specialised in both figurative and abstract works with a very limited palette, using black and white to create an impression of colouration where there was in fact none. They argued that “you always over compensate for your disabilities”, and that “restricting your palette so harshly only serves to make you create greater art.” But the movement was not a popular one, and they were not liked by other artists as their boorish behaviour and portrayal of the “poor artist living in a garret” as a loser whose faults were to be found in the fact they their parents hadn’t worked hard enough to afford the private education and income that they enjoyed, only served to alienate them both from other artists and the public as a whole.
Their art was mono-tonal, unimaginative, and usually on a very large scale. Their private incomes allowed them to do pretty much as they pleased without regard for sales, or art, or anything else, gaining their slight foothold in the art establishment through nothing more than their parents’ social contacts, while they played the part of the ‘artist’, drinking, drug taking, and smashing up bars in hedonistic outbursts of self aggrandisement.
In fact, the greatest contribution they made to art was to coin the term ‘neo-tonalist’ as a way of belittling the work of a new group of painters who had emerged as a direct reaction to their bad art and behaviour and whose manifesto was almost exactly opposite to theirs.
They were a small group, nothing more than a few friends who shared a studio at the beginning of their careers, and had no name that they called themselves collectively so the sobriquet ‘neo-tonalist’ stuck, and they have been known as that ever since.
The neo-tonalists had nothing to do with the tonalists artistically or socially, but they did also enjoy the idea of a restricted palette, and as if to separate themselves from the dire paintings produced by their dilettante neo-namesakes, they wrote their own manifesto, half heartedly trying to remove the label the tonalists had given them, but in reality re-enforcing the comparison between their ideas, raising the erroneous question of why they left the tonalists in the first place, which of course they never had.
Their manifesto was as short and uninteresting to read as the tonalists’ paintings were to look at, stating, more or less, that they would use any colours other than black or white. Their paintings, however, were far greater. They were abstract artists, generally creating geometries of various kinds using all manner of shapes and forms that interlaced with each other, or cut into each other, or simply rested against each other, often using calculations and equations that were far beyond the likes of the tonalists. Their works, especially those of their best known advocate, Pandwa Ilyich, an Indian born Anglo-Russian, are extremely decorative despite the sometimes tortuous reasoning and number crunching that accompany their creation.
While the neo-tonalists were gaining strength, and the tonalists sank into privileged obscurity, the randomists continued on their idiosyncratic path to create works that one way or another incorporated random elements into their creation thus influencing their final form, albeit a form which had restrictions built into it so that “chaos cannot reign unabashed”, as one of their number, Leyland Johns, was fond of saying.
The randomists were an interesting group of people, comprising painters, sculptors, stockbrokers, television producers, a professor of palaeontology, and at least two magicians. Their art varied hugely, from paintings done while blindfolded, to large sculptures derived from computer programs that generated pseudo random numbers to create 3D organic-like shapes that were then manufactured by highly skilled engineers to create monumental artworks that are still very much sought after by local authorities with the cash to spend on public art. And there were events, many events, that seemed to spring up from nowhere, taking over a shop, a gallery, or any given public space, simply to rouse a sense of awe and wonder, if not confusion. Their pieces were not always successful, but more often than not were at least entertaining.
Among their works were such pieces as John Skant’s Random Money. John Skant was an American stockbroker who shot a film of himself taking random decisions as to what to buy or sell. The film shows him in front of a computer screen as he makes the trades with a ticker tape along the bottom that displays the ever changing profit or loss he was making, with the prices of the stocks being traded read out by John Thomas, the legendary English boxer, over a soundtrack of 1930’s Broadway show tunes. At the end of the half-hour of filming, which is shown in real time, the tally shows that in fact he made a profit of $101,543. Subsequent versions of the same process, however, led to some very heavy losses, and in the end he was fired from the firm he was working for and was convicted of insider dealing while trying to regain the money he had lost, whereupon he was locked up, wrote a book, and on his release became a rather right wing politician.
The best known of the randomists’ events, which veered into the realms of the surreal, occurred on a river boat that went up and down the Thames in London, passing the Houses of Parliament. There was nothing political in the event itself, all the decisions that had been made were carefully chosen at random. Forty-three people gathered on the deck of the boat, dressed in costume, either a cucumber, or a ring doughnut; the costumes were chosen, apparently, at random. Everything went as planned, they simply motored up and down the Thames, hoping to catch the eye of anyone on the shore, until boredom got the better of them and the cucumbers started inserting themselves into the doughnuts every time they passed the Palace of Westminster. Eventually they were spotted by an MP, and soon enough the river police came along to put an end to their happy revelling.
Aside from these entertaining, if, on the whole, unfulfilling works of art, there were one or two more serious artists whose works were arrived at through a meaningful internal discourse. They provided the bedrock of the styles and thinking that were followed by a number of different artists that saw the creation of works of a somewhat more trivial nature; it was through one of them that the trouble started between the neo-tonalists, and the randomists.
Elemina Edlund was the catalyst, since her Pox paintings were very similar to those of the neo-tonalist, Robert Bute, who had already annoyed some of the randomists by introducing random elements into his neo-tonalist Dot paintings. These started out as coloured grounds with an array of transitional hues painted as dots in a regular grid pattern alternating between three different colours. His series of paintings developed along traditional neo-tonalist lines until his fascination with the dot, or ‘singularity’ as he preferred to call it, superseded the background colour, leaving the primed canvas bare, painting only the dots with the white of the canvas as the ground.
His paintings were greatly liked by the public and critics, but their similarity to Edlund’s Pox paintings did not go unnoticed by the randomists, and when two of his works at an exhibition were unveiled to reveal a series of singularities whose colours were chosen at random, they publicly denounced his paintings as copies of Edlund’s, and further lambasted his works as not really neo-tonalist at all given that the predominant colour of his paintings was the white of the canvas.
Bute retaliated, in print, that the randomist paintings by Edlund, the most famous of which utilised the randomness of strangers off the street for their creation, were not actually random at all, but that is was well known by insiders that they were in fact carefully choreographed happenings that employed her friends as actors to carry out her pre-designed requests to the letter. And during this interview he repeatedly used the word ‘random’ in a sarcastic sense, which only served to increase the tensions between the two.
Things came to a head one evening in a pub in west London where a friend of Bute’s was attacked by Edlund’s boyfriend after a brief and rather misogynistic comment relating to the size of Edlund’s artistic assets.
Thereafter there were reprisals.
The building where most of the randomists had their studios had “random?” painted on the wall of the building in fluorescent pink paint. The randomists retaliated in kind, throwing one tin of black, and one tin of white paint over the door to the building where Bute and Pandwa Ilyich had their studios, and finally there was another attack on a group exhibition of the randomists, where paint was thrown all over the gallery and the works on display.
The police were called, but the perpetrator had long since gone. According to the artists that were interviewed at the time, the police did not take the investigation particularly seriously, joining in with Bute’s attitude while their witness statements were being taken by repeatedly using the word ‘random’ in a way which all too clearly showed that they weren’t impressed by, as one artist quoted them as saying, “these so-called artists”.
There followed a rather uninspiring attempt at finding the culprit by entering the studios of the neo-tonalists looking for “paint of a similar nature” to that which had been thrown in the gallery. Needless to say, they found plenty of the stuff in almost every studio since it was a typical product used by the neo-tonalists, but even so, three artists were arrested, only to be released without charge shortly after.
The chain of events was causing a lot of anxiety among the most prominent artists of the two groups. They decided to hold a meeting, where they managed to settle their differences, and even worked on an idea for a joint exhibition to galvanise their energies in a more creative direction, while making full use of the publicity that the animosity between them had gained. It seemed that there were to be no more reprisals, and instead, there was to be a joining of forces to bring all of their art to the attention of a wider public for everyone’s benefit.
But a week later a fire broke out in the randomists’ studios. It was late at night, but the habit many artists have of working through to the early hours of the morning caught twenty-one artists in the converted factory off guard. Due to the high level of combustible and toxic materials present in any artists’ studio complex, the fire took hold with great speed, trapping the twenty-one in the building. Only four of them survived.
The investigation that followed showed a lamentable lack of interest by the police when following the initial investigation into the gallery attack, as they traced back the events that had led up to the fire. But eventually they found their man, or woman in this case, Jane ‘Random’ Bignol, who had an unsettling mental history and had affiliated herself to the randomists, committing a number of random acts of theft and violence, including the gallery attack, that she claimed were works of art.
In reality, she was a loner, someone who had never been known to create art of any kind, but who had found in the randomists something that she could ally herself to, and use as an excuse for the actions she took. On the night of the fire, she entered the randomists’ studios as someone else left the building, and set light to a rubbish bin in a corridor by pouring in litres of white spirit and rags on which was painted “I hate the randomists”, hoping, in her mania, to point the finger of blame at the neo-tonalists who she saw as an enemy that was out to destroy all her ‘friends’, the randomists. And so, the seemingly random series of events that led to the fire, were found not to be random at all, but caused by a state of delusion.
In some ways, I can imagine Tuppley being drawn to this idea as out of the chaos, some kind of order – or reason – was found. It is perhaps no surprise, therefore, with all that was still going on in the background as the investigation into the murder of Zara Friese continued, that he maintained his focus on the randomists, the fire that killed seventeen of their number, and the one piece that managed, like a phoenix borne of the flames of tragedy, to rise to the top most rank of re-creatable art. It is a piece that brings together the neo-tonalists and the randomists every year on the day the fire broke out, where, as one, they commemorate the deaths by re-creating the famous work 11:04am by Leyland Johns.
Leyland Johns was one of the instigators of the randomist movement. He specialised in creating points in time that “through the ineffable glory of interconnected events, going back to the dawn of time itself”, aimed to define time through his actions that he claimed could not have come about in any other way. These were seemingly random events, but with a design, akin to choosing which species of butterfly would cause the hurricane in the well known theory of chaos.
11:04am was already something of an archetype by the time he was killed. He had made it with the intention of being able to reproduce it himself for exhibition, at any time, rather than as a purely re-creatable piece as Tuppley would have done; its reproducibility was a conceptual point for Johns that was being made as part of the piece, rather than as a statement of future intent.
However, it is testament to his skill and artistry that this work has appeared so regularly without the loss of any of its subtleties time and time again, since its inclusion in LIBERART, providing the observer with an unparalleled insight into time, space, and random events. The degree to which the temporal aspect had been so specifically recognised in this work, has enabled those interested in such matters to celebrate it as one of the greatest of all repeated points in time, though, annoyingly, he resolutely refused to divulge the date that it was created on, maintaining that dates are only relevant to another point in time which is not universal, but dependent on your culture. However, a time within the cycle of a single day is understandable to any human being whatever their temporal traditions.
If you have not come across this piece before, it is hard to explain the true dramatic intensity that it possesses and which increases every time you see it. When you first approach it in a gallery, you are not altogether sure what it is. At first glance it appears to be a jumble of small rectangular blocks, each painted black on three sides, dumped on the floor. Then you move a little closer, and the black and white of the blocks start playing tricks with your eyes as they compete with their shadows to define themselves. You move closer still, and notice, faintly on the floor, a grid marked out, and you realise this is no accident, no ill conceived gesture of perplexity, but is something quite deliberate.
You look for the title, the label of the piece, for some more information, and there you have it: 11:04am, and you know that this is an exact point in time, in history, transported through the temporal void, for your pleasure. And despite its seemingly random nature, and its rather high minded conception, its presence in that room is anything but random, and it does make you think, almost at once, what was I doing at 11:04am?
The second time you see the piece, perhaps made by someone else entirely, you are taken back to the point in time when you first saw it, and again you think of what you were doing at that time. Then, just as you are about to move off to look at something else, you notice one block in particular, a block you noticed the first time you saw it, and you realise it is in exactly the same position, the same angle, balancing on the same block as before, and again you are struck by the fact that it is the re-creation of an exact point in time.
The third time you see the piece, maybe a year or two later, you greet it like an old friend, a memory, a point in time that is now part of your own personal history, inextricably interweaving Leyland Johns’ life with your own. And this time you marvel at the exactitude exhibited in its precise re-creation. It is an astonishing concept to encapsulate so succinctly a single point in time since the notion of time is not only woven with the vicarious perceptions of man, but is also linked with space itself, and so to be able to define in any way a single point in that sea of unending continua, is a stroke of genius by anyone’s measure.
To my mind, this truly is a masterpiece, a moment caught in time for ever more, attracting more points in time from everyone who sees it, which orbit the moment of its creation as if the central star of a solar system, attracting more and more points in time towards itself as its mass and meaning increase with every day that extends away from its birth, like the Big Bang itself.
It was created four months before the fire that killed Leyland Johns and the other artists caught in the studios. He had carved out of a larger piece of plaster of Paris a simple rectangular block that could be held nicely in the hand. From this, he made a mould and cast it 107 more times, and painted each new block black on three adjacent faces. He constructed a wooden barrier on the floor of his studio, which secured a space exactly 1 metre by 1 metre square, within which he carefully marked out a grid of 10cm squares with a pencil.
All the blocks were put into a large plastic bucket and tipped into the space, and then the wooden sides removed. He looked at his watch and noted the time. It was precisely 11:04am. He spent the next few days taking photographs of the piece from above, between each photo removing one block from the pile to make an accurate record of exactly how the blocks fell so he could reproduce the moment, step by step, at any time. But of course, he was never to reproduce it himself.
He had been working on a new project at the time involving the random paths taken by marbles through a complex labyrinth of tunnels and corridors when the fire took hold. He was found in his studio curled up in a ball with dirty cloths wrapped round his head and clasping the original block for the piece which made his name. It seems he was trying to shield himself from the effects of the smoke that had so quickly taken hold over the upper stories, blocking off his path to the stairs. By the time he realised what was happening he made one last desperate phone call to his wife, and tried, in vain, to prevent the smoke from getting into his studio, and his lungs. But it was too late. He had no chance of escape.
Thankfully, the original photographs for the construction of 11:04am survive, as did the original block he carved which was never used as part of the work itself, but kept as the prototype, the original form from which all other blocks are cast. So we can now, and for ever more, in commemoration of his life and those of the other sixteen who died on that terrible night, re-create his masterpiece.
It has become common practice to use strong asymmetrical lighting on this piece, as it helps to engender the work with a visual dimension that creates a trick in the eye, suggesting blocks being there were there are none due to the high contrast creating a confusion between the shadows and the painted sides.
MATERIALS
• prototype block and reference photographs from LIBERART
• silicone rubber for mould making
• 25kg hard casting plaster
• metal ruler or similar
• smooth finish matt black masonry paint
• hard pencil
STEP-BY-STEP
1.
Apply to LIBERART for the prototype block and photographic materials needed.
To properly re-create this piece you must apply to LIBERART, who hold the original block and photographs made by Leyland Johns. They will send you a prototype block, cast from a mould made from the original block that Leyland Johns used, as well as a copy of the photographs from which you can, step by step, exactly position the blocks to re-create Johns’ piece.
2.
Make a mould from which to cast all your blocks.
You need to make a mould from the prototype block LIBERART sends you, from which you can then cast all 107 blocks for the piece. The easiest and advised way of doing this is out of silicone rubber, making a mould open on one side as indicated on the prototype. You can of course make more than one mould to speed up the block casting process.
3.
Cast 107 new blocks for the piece.
Fill your mould with plaster to just overflowing, and then scrape off the top with a metal ruler after the plaster has just started to set (5-10 minutes). You must use a hard casting plaster as that will prevent any accidental chips or breaks of the blocks. To give you some idea of the time it takes to create all 107 blocks, if you spend 8 hours a day filling the mould, waiting for it to cure, demoulding and then filling it again, it will take you about two weeks to make all the blocks you need. Make more blocks than necessary, just in case, and set aside one block cast from each mould you make. These will have to be sent to LIBERART later on for them to verify their authenticity in order to maintain the sanctity of the piece.
4.
Paint your blocks.
Once you have made your blocks you need to paint each one on three adjacent sides. Painting the blocks must be done carefully so as not to contaminate the white sides, using smooth matt black masonry paint, easily available at most DIY stores. You must also note that opposite sides must not both be painted. You will find that all the painted sides will congregate around one corner of the block, wherever you start.
5.
Mark out the grid and lay down the blocks.
In recent times it has become customary to orient the blocks exactly with the way they fell in Johns’ studio. The details have been worked out by diligent and enthusiastic Liberartists who, knowing where his studio was located within the building, and by talking to those who saw the original in his studio, have been able to exactly determine how the original blocks were oriented en masse. It is not mandatory to do this, but is a nice touch if you are able. There are others still who, due to the proliferation of devices with GPS, instead orient their blocks to point to the exact location where the blocks fell. This though, rather complicates matters, as it draws space and time together creating a context that some see as detrimental to the aims of the original piece.
Once you have determined if you are going to follow either of the two methods above, or neither, you must first mark out the grid, a 1m x 1m square, with 10cm divisions. Do this using a light pencil line that is barely visible other than to those up close placing the blocks. It is not necessary to construct a wooden barrier as Johns did, since you are not tipping the blocks in, but are placing them carefully, and so have no need to constrain where they fall. Using the photographs to help you position the blocks, lay them down very carefully, one by one, exactly how they fell that morning for Leyland Johns. Some of them have to balance a little precariously, so don’t imagine this is the easy part. It takes time and concentration to re-create this piece well. The rules from LIBERART state that you must take a photograph of your progress each time you place a block so that you, and they, can compare your efforts with those of the original to be sure that your work is of a sufficiently high standard.
6.
Send your photographs and example blocks to LIBERART for authentication.
Once you have finished, send the photographs you have taken recording your progress to LIBERART, along with one block cast from each of the moulds you have made, who will reply with a certificate of authentication if they are satisfied with the result of your endeavours. This certificate can then be displayed alongside the work to verify that it is an accurate and genuine re-creation of Johns’ original, and has been entered into the official series.
Time is one thing, but what about space? All art requires space of one form or another to exist, but suppose our concern is not the fact of art using space, but the space itself; how can space be explored through the art that is using it? Luckily for us, Tuppley examined this very question himself while he was studying the randomists and neo-tonalists. It led to one of his most frequently re-created pieces, a favourite of Liberartists, and a classic of re-creatable art: Definition:Space.
Tuppley’s interest in randomism had its roots in the events that had shaped his life, not only in Berlin, but his unhappy and abusive childhood too. These were all events that he had no control over and which forced his hand, one way or another, to become the artist we know. But he shied away from producing randomist works himself, except for one piece he constructed shortly after Carlos Fry’s Screambox was exhibited, when Günter Hoffman asked him to return to Berlin to take part in a group show he had organised called ‘Art Life’. Initially Tuppley declined the offer, but later relented with the support of Carla Friedrich, yet refused absolutely to accept Hoffman’s title for the show as any kind of guide as to what he should create.
Given his recent experiences of blacking out when he tried too hard to recall the night he found Zara Friese’s body, one can imagine his apprehension at the thought of returning to the city that bore his greatest nightmare. But he was forced to concede the opportunity was not one he could forsake; he was eager to make something new, to do something different to what he had done before and put into play some of the ideas he had come across while collecting his recipes and discussing art with Carlos Fry and Marco Chillds.
This was an important time for Tuppley. He felt that he was on an upward trajectory in his state of mind, that somehow, he was being pulled out of the mire that had been dragging him down even before he went to Berlin the first time, and since which had found him floundering in the cesspit of emotion brought on by his disillusionment with art and the experiences that led to Blood Bed.
During his first visit to Berlin he hadn’t produce any art at all, but helped others to do so. In contrast, this trip gave him an opportunity to confront the demons that were born there by mining a new seam of artefact creation that he could bring back to London and rebuild his life with. And far from miring him in a past he could not remember of finding his lover’s body, it spurred in him an ever greater need to create and by doing so brushing away the torments of all previous experience.
Its title is clearly derived from his first recipe of all, Definition:Self, and as such signalled his intention to return from where he left off artistically, before his first visit to Berlin, and certainly encouraged those around him to see it as a sign that he was in some tentative state of recovery.
Definition:Space is a simple piece, beautifully simple, yet ultimately extremely complex in its outcome. It is a work that is constructed from a single piece of string, a single length unwound to create a web that intersects and describes the space it moves through.
In his notebook he wrote about the idea of defining and examining the spaces we experience as a matter of course, in our day-to-day lives, without thought or conscious questioning, and the limitless possibilities that such an endeavour affords the artist.
One way to scrutinize the everyday is to dissect it. Cut it up into smaller parts that can be more easily perceived. And the best way to do that in space is to create the cuts as defined lines using a medium that you can see: string. This inevitably prompts the question “how long is a piece of string” as a companion to the medium, and for his version of this work, at least, the question is answered, it being 149.85 metres. But although the answer can be defined absolutely, the question still hangs in the air, literally, within the work, since what the piece of string actually does is far more important than its length.
The web itself took over the last three metres of the exhibition space, up to the end wall. Into that wall, and the adjacent side walls, the ceiling, and the floor, Tuppley hammered in nails with large round heads, at random, sixteen on the end wall itself, seven on the left, and six on the right wall, four on the ceiling and seven on the floor. He then tied the end of his spool of cotton string, which he had dyed light blue, to the most insignificant of points, and from there, took it across the space to another nail, wrapped it round, and then off to another nail, wrapped it round again, and so on, keeping the string taut, traversing the space until there were enough intersections that he could play with, pulling the twine over one line to go at an angle towards another nail on the ceiling, or on the floor, or across to another line and around again, tying the space up with an ever more convoluted series of vectors until the whole space had been caught and subdued like a wild animal finally broken, obeying its master through the determination of the single line of thought that wove itself through it.
When you approach the piece, in its original location, you are immediately transported to another dimension, a dimension where space does not relate to what you assume space to be. You can see the wall, the light switch, the door that leads to, god knows where, and the string is thin enough that it doesn’t destroy that sense of the room whereby you can imagine turning the light on, or going through the door, but you cannot reach them, you are stuck, you are caught by the web.
All of a sudden you are made aware of the space that has been taken over, how valuable it is, how essential, and how much it is taken for granted. You want to reach for the door handle because you cannot, you have your limitations demonstrated to you and your assumption blown as the end of the room, a normal exhibition space with white walls and ceiling lights, becomes something different, becomes an exhibit itself.
I once saw an example of this work that took over an entire room. Needless to say, you could not enter the room, save for just inside the door. The whole space became something unreachable, yet familiar as any gallery space is, and I longed to crawl beneath and between the contorted lines that displayed before me a myriad of possibilities of points in space that I had hitherto no notion of at all. It taught me, in that instant, that space is not something to be fooled with; it is vital, immediate, and as valuable as breath itself.
Tuppley recorded this recipe on his return to London. He stated, “it doesn’t matter how many nails you use, or how long the string. All that is important is that the lines cut up the space. The result is completely in the hands of the maker.” The recipe is therefore a very simple one.
MATERIALS
• between 7 and 200 large head nails or screws, depending on site
• cotton string, dyed a colour of your choice
STEP-BY-STEP
1.
Hammer in the nails to the walls, ceiling, and floor of the space you are using.
Take a handful of clout nails or other similar nails with large heads, and hammer them into the walls, ceiling and floor of the space at random. Depending on the materials the walls, floor and ceiling are made from, you may find that screws would be more appropriate, though it requires considerably more effort. If you have difficulty in finding random positions for the nails, or deciding how many nails to use, you can employ one of the many random generation methods available to help you. Do not be tempted to overfill the space since it is not the nails that create the piece, they are simply the anchor points to which the string is attached; nor should you be tempted to fill every corner, or create an even spread of anchor points – simply ensure that there are some anchor points available on every physical surface that bounds the space you are using. You will find on commencing the work that anchor points exist within the space where there is no nail to attach to but only the lines you have already drawn. These can readily be bisected to form angles and contours within the area you are describing.
2.
Attach the end of your string to any anchor point, and proceed to draw within the space again and again until complete.
Start your web by tying the end of your string to one nail, which one is irrelevant, and pull it towards another nail far across the space, then to another that goes through the space rather than along the wall, and then another, until you reach a point whereby you can loop around exiting lines to alter the course of the string, securing to the anchor points where necessary. Continue in this fashion until the space is filled to your requirements.
This work is akin to an abstract line drawing in three dimensions, following Paul Klee’s dictum, “taking a line for a walk”. Its quality and passion is completely down to the maker who must judge for themselves where the lines should go and how many lines there should be. But beware, that if the space is filled too much, the string itself becomes the exhibit rather than the space it is describing, and then the work is lost. You must at all times concentrate on the space you are using to avoid the string becoming the predominant feature like a prima donna who thinks they are more important than what they do.
However much string you use, you must be sure to keep an accurate record of its length, since to answer the question, “how long is a piece of string”, which you will inevitably be asked, it is as well to have a definitive answer.
Art can be used to examine questions as existential as time and space, and as base as monetary value, but that still leaves the question of art itself. Art can play at being different things in order to stretch the boundaries of what it can do and how it is perceived, but how can we examine the finished piece through its own existence? To Tuppley, at least, there was only one clear answer, and the idea took him back to his roots when in order to understand anything, there was only one course of action open to him: paint it.
After he returned from Berlin the second time, fate had one more disaster to throw at him. Carla Friedrich, who had cradled his fragile state of mind from the moment he returned after discovering Zara Friese’s murder, finally succumbed to an inoperable tumour in her brain only days after they married.
After Carla’s death, his enthusiasm for the interestingly entertaining such as the randomists and electronics based works waned. Instead, he was on the lookout for something more desperate, art that confronted the pain of existence by artists who, on the whole, had found life a profoundly difficult thing to deal with.
It wasn’t to be long before he made his penultimate piece, Machine, but before he arrived at that point, he experimented in-recipe with one or two others that tried to get art to look at itself – art in the mirror. But where they took him, in the end, was nowhere. For at least one other artist however, one of his recipes took the maker to some very dark places indeed.
This is one of the saddest cases of all the recipes in his collection. Matt Strand was a loner, a perfectionist, and a painter of rare ability. His childhood was scarred by bullying at school, and his difficulty in exams, which caused his high achieving father, a wealthy commodities broker with a PHD in economics, a good deal of pain which he took out on his misunderstood only child. It is thought now, that he suffered from a form of Asperger’s Syndrome that was never diagnosed, since, once the opportunity came for him to shine in the arts, all problems surrounding other aspects of his life were brushed aside as being nothing more than the affects of an artistic and eccentric mind. And shine he did, in painting particularly, with his attention to detail in the creation of his works, designing the composition, and executing their production with immense skill.
At his degree show he was picked up straight away by a commercial gallery which pushed his works as hard as they could. The other graduates had produced works of varying ineptitude, vain attempts at contemporary art, obnoxious and self regarding for the most part, but Strand, bucking the trend, maintained his interest in the traditional concept of portraiture, much to his tutors’ dismay. Despite his lack of interest in contemporary forms of art, his ability surpassed all around him as he quickly became successful, painting portraits of the wealthy through his father’s contacts, and then of the famous.
Fame has a way of rubbing off on other people, and Strand soon became something of a celebrity himself in the world of portraiture. But he found his position an increasingly uncomfortable one. He claimed in interview that he never wanted to be a portrait painter, and that he cared nothing for money or fame, that the only thing that kept him painting was that it was the only way he could get at what people actually were, since he simply didn’t understand them as a thing outside of himself as he struggled with friendships and relationships in general.
As his bank balance and fame grew, he became more reclusive, and started refusing to see those that he was commissioned to paint. Instead, he insisted on photographs being taken which he would assimilate to create the finished portrait. This worked for a while, but soon even the photographs were too much for him; packages of photos lay unopened in his studio while he imagined the faces of those he was meant to be painting.
Needless to say, these last portraits didn’t go down well with his clients who, before too long, lost interest in Strand’s work. But still, his need to understand people remained, a need which he allayed by painting himself, over and over again, becoming ever more desperate at what he saw as his inability to connect to others, until he found LIBERART.
Following Carla’s death, Tuppley continued to come up with new ideas. One recipe he created called All You Have Ever Been, which featured a bipartite portrait using a painting and an audio portrait in conjunction with each other, briefly awoke in him a renewed interest in painting as a form of artefact creation, though he didn’t do any more himself. But he had one last idea, one way of questioning his hitherto unshakable belief in painting as a form of art, one that he had spent most of his life believing in, and which, in the end, he felt let him down.
With this piece it was as if he was continuing a journey into his past that he had started with All You Have Ever Been, which took him back to before he painted landscapes, and then back further still to his primal need to paint with these questions: what was painting? How did it work? How could you examine the process of painting itself through the creation of art or artefact? The answer, to Tuppley at least, was simple. It was the solution he had always used for the more philosophical problems that he wrestled with in his life. To try and understand what a painting was, you had to paint it.
Strand, although in a similarly desperate state of mind, was not looking in the same direction as Tuppley. Tuppley’s introspection was founded on his struggle to survive within a mind that had been seriously affected by outside events, and his creative instincts always forced him to look away from himself to find the answers he was looking for. But for Strand, Tuppley’s recipe provided him with the perfect means of self destruction, a legitimate and elegant solution that allowed him to obsess about himself without hindrance or perspective.
The essence of this piece is a series paintings, each one painted using the last as the subject for the next. The first painting, however, needs a subject of some kind, and Tuppley suggests that if your usual subject matter isn’t especially benign, then something like a clear blue sky may be used to allow full reign to the imagination without dictating any specific line of enquiry so that you can concentrate on the act of painting alone. But that is not what Strand did.
Perhaps if he had followed Tuppley’s recipe a little closer, he would have read these lines: “…it should be something you can paint easily so that the idea of the painting becomes the focus. Avoid yourself.”
Tuppley was clearly aware, even in his fragile state, that focusing such a series of works with ones own self as the starting point could lead to mental disaster. But this warning obviously passed Strand by, since far from using the benign starting point of the infinity of the heavens, he used himself, a self portrait. For someone given to introspection this was, perhaps, a bad move.
The multitudinous series of self portraits that had brought him to this point had become more and more aggressive and disturbing. This new one, the first in the series of twelve, was similarly dark, an intensely penetrating expressionistic image of a young man, thin faced, hair cropped short, staring straight at you, boring its way into your mind with eyes of life and death. From this, the rest of the series followed.
It was some time before the canvases came to light. Matt Strand wasn’t missed for several weeks until the weather started warming up in late spring and a smell festered its way through the crack beneath the door to his studio flat where he lived and worked.
The success he had made of himself could have afforded him any number of small or large houses to live and work in, alone, but he had no interest in creating such a fortress for himself, or in demonstrating his wealth to those around him with unnecessary purchases and over-indulgent investments, so he remained in the small open-plan apartment he had rented since leaving home.
It was one of his neighbours in the same shared building that became concerned, though she admitted it was more because of the smell than for Strand’s well-being since she couldn’t remember ever having actually seen him. She called the agents who looked after the property, and eventually persuaded them to send someone round to have a look. There was no answer at the door, so they left.
The neighbour called again as the smell got worse and she swore she could hear a strange buzzing sound coming from the flat. This time the agents sent round a new employee, Hannah Barton, who was only seventeen years old. She arrived with the keys, and after repeatedly banging on the door to see if any answer could be gained, and on receiving none, she unlocked it, as she was instructed, and pushed it open.
The first thing that struck her was the appalling smell. The second thing was the flies that swarmed around the far corner of the flat. Unsure what to do, she went in to try and discover what was going on, calling out Strand’s name as she went, then realised, to her horror, that the flies were buzzing around the bloated remains of a naked body, painted black from head to toe, surrounded by empty vodka bottles and his last dozen paintings.
When I saw these paintings for the first time they were exhibited in a darkly lit room with sombre red walls. The situation did not enliven the works with any sense of joie de vivre, but then these paintings were more like a long suicide note than a celebration of the life affirming glory of art.
The first was conventional enough, an expressionistic self portrait, but with immense power behind the eyes. And the second, a little different, had already created an amount of distortion that suggested a character with monstrous possibilities. The eyes grew larger, the skin tone greener, the mouth a little thinner, the hair a little more undecided. With these first two you really do get a sense of his ability as an artist, as a painter of portraits, of faces, of character. He conjures up a story within the paint, a tragic story of desperation, misunderstanding, and grappling for the truth whatever it may be. They are accomplished, well painted, and powerful, and as such would grace the wall of any gallery. But then they grew darker.
The third in the series takes a more abstract tack. The edge of the ears are lost, the hair remains, but only as a suggestion, the eyes become less defined in detail though remaining overtly large, and the nose starts to disappear too, playing tricks with your eyes, sometimes appearing to go back into the head instead of out towards you, like a phantom, as if it is only your assumption that there should be a nose there that causes one to be seen. The next few are as if a repetition of this theme, changing slowly through the seventh, eighth and ninth. The mouth goes, save for a black line on a black background, his eyes have grown hugely, distorted in shape and look, and nothing but the skeletal outline of his head remains from all the other features that were originally present. By the time he gets to the tenth painting, the clouds have descended. Black, alizarin crimson, and chrome green are the predominant colours here as we watch, with a heavy heart, his descent, knowing his time is nearly up.
Whether or not you are affected by these last paintings is entirely down to your ability to empathise. It is like watching a snuff movie, and I wasn’t convinced that displaying them, especially in such a dark and sombre room, was giving enough respect to the man whose death I was, by stages, watching.
The eleventh painting is almost completely white, with the bare remnants of features gouged out of the thick impasto. It is clearly a cry for help, but the cry is not external, to another person, it is to himself, trying to force a way out of the dead end he has gone down by painting what almost amounts to a negative version of the tenth, as if by reversing the polarity of what is all too obviously his dying thoughts, that somehow he would be able to escape his inevitable end. But no. Painting number twelve, the last painting, brings him back to black.
Two voids take over half the canvas with pinpricks of dark green within, like the dying embers of a poisoned flame. The thinnest of lines for his mouth cuts its way in a painful crack across the bottom of the canvas barely visible over the background of black variants, green and red, and a lazy line crawling over the top of the eyes like a shroud, where once there was a recognisable human form, a skull, a head, a person. But no longer. He has reduced himself to a being that sees so much, but cannot cry out, and that is how he dies. One needn’t try to imagine the terrible world he found himself in, since it is plain for all to see.
Painting pictures was no longer any aid to his mental state, so he uses his own body as his final canvas, stripping naked and covering himself in ivory black, the last in the series, painting number thirteen, as he drinks himself to death.
This is a simple series of works to instigate, rather harder to complete. Many have tried and failed. It takes someone with a strong constitution to finish all twelve paintings to a high enough standard. As a matter of respect, the number of canvases in this recipe is limited to twelve, although some have claimed they could have gone on. But it is thought appropriate to acknowledge Strand’s lost fight that saw his death as the final canvas.
MATERIALS
• 12 canvases, all the same dimensions
• paint and brushes
• starting subject
STEP-BY-STEP
1.
Choose your starting subject and complete the first painting.
It is important to choose a subject that you are familiar with and that doesn’t present you with any great challenges. This is only the position from where you start the series, and following this point, the concept of painting as a form of art becomes the subject. Whatever you choose, it should be benign and simple for you to accomplish. On no account use yourself. Complete this first painting as swiftly as you can so that the subject doesn’t overtake it. If you have chosen your subject well, you will find that it quickly becomes immaterial in the following canvases.
2.
Continue to paint the series.
Put the first completed painting in front of you, where you can see it well, and start painting the rest of the series, re-interpreting the image on each previous canvas until all twelve paintings in the cycle have been completed. You might find yourself struggling for inspiration by the fifth or sixth painting, but that is partly the point. You are put in a position where you must look even harder and delve even deeper into your understanding of what painting is.
One of the more complex questions art has to answer revolves around the artist’s experience of the audiences’ experience of their art. Artists do not work in a vacuum, however much they might wish to think their art is purely an expression of their own will, and so the effect their audience can have on them, given the right circumstances, can prove every bit as important as any other influence.
As Tuppley’s star began to rise through pieces such as Blood Bed and The Infinite I Am, he was left contemplating the darkest of places, uncaring for the promise of his future career prospects. Though uncaring, he was clearly not unaware of his position as he questioned the perception that others had of the art he made, more especially because he no longer saw himself as an artist at all, but a maker of artefacts. He wasn’t the first artist to ask the question, and is unlikely to be the last, but there was one artist whose obsession with the perception her work received became the focal point of her renowned creations, and is a lesson to us all.
Silvia Ikkesett, like Mathew Strand, started her career as a portrait painter. She revelled in great detail, producing works on canvas whose heightened realism was the result of her tendency toward the extreme, and her insistence on concentrating with almost microscopic detail on the features of her clients. As a young woman she toured the great cities of art in Europe, painting her way through actors and politicians, whose vanity insisted on her presenting them with a level of detail they often later came to regret.
Success followed her wherever she went despite the small controversies that her candour elicited, including, on one occasion, a brief attempt at suing her for defamation by a client. But it was quickly dropped due to the incontrovertible evidence that the portrait she had painted, which was the subject of the lawsuit, was an unquestionably and extremely accurate representation of their likeness. None of this gave her any pause for thought however, as she continued her travels, eventually settling in London.
Her favourite subjects were actors. She enjoyed the notion of their character being assumed by everybody who had seen their work, but who in fact were usually very different. Some were shy, almost embarrassed at the idea that anyone knew who they were, having been more or less forced into the position of having their portrait painted as some kind of spurious reward for their talent by one organisation or another. But some were rather more ego-centric, and she did not get on with all of them. On one famous film actor she commented, “the banality of the characters he plays are only outweighed by the tedium of his personality.”
In one celebrated case she was painting a stage actor who was well known at the time for one particular role, but who later fell out of favour, it having been discovered that he had only one character within him that he was any good at playing, despite his success at playing it.
During the sitting, a fight broke out between the two. Ikkesett had insisted on examining the actor’s face with a magnifying glass to fully appreciate the detail of the pock-marked skin she was intent on reproducing with her customary accuracy, but the actor wasn’t too keen on being examined at such close quarters, and the final straw came when upon a particular examination of a rather prominent spot that had emerged that morning, Ikkesett managed to cause a serious burn on the actor’s cheek. She had moved her sitter into direct sunlight in order to get as good a view as possible with her magnifying glass, and failed to notice an area of intense candescence focused tightly on the actors skin caused by the sun shining through the glass she was holding, until the smell of burning flesh forced her to stop her examination, and her model lashed out at her in pain and self-defence. Needless to say, the portrait was never finished.
But her success was starting to bore her, as were the innumerable commissions for portraits. She started reducing the areas she concentrated on within the face, homing in on particular characteristics and features which she reserved for her special attention. The rest of the painting she started to block in with a more abstract style, which gave the sitter the appearance of coming through some kind of multicoloured fog into the foreground, but in the end she simply left those areas blank. Eventually she stopped painting portraits altogether.
After giving up the role that had made her name, she briefly concentrated her talents on very traditional still lives, using fruit and crockery as the main subjects, and then moved on to using found objects, or things that just happened to be around. These included a series of crunched up cigarette packets in ashtrays, discarded fast-food containers, often with the food still in them half eaten, and tiny wild flowers which she would harvest from between paving stones, or under trees on the street. She would put them on the table in her studio without any real application of composition, creating beautifully executed but rather uninspiring works. Then she stopped painting completely.
For two years nothing was heard from her. No paintings, no exhibitions, no art of any kind, until she came back with a brand new idea which didn’t involve painting pictures of anything at all.
In interview, she said she had grown tired of painting, tired of being regarded as a great talent that could do almost no wrong, and lamented the fact that whenever she had an exhibition, thousands would flock to see the show, because it was Sylvia Ikkesett, the renowned artist and burner of actors. She continued, “they don’t care about what I do, they come for my name, for me”; she became disillusioned. As far as she was concerned, the public doted on her every brush stroke because of her proximity to the rich and famous, and the fame that it conferred on her. She found the whole experience superficial and pointless, and so decided to give the public and the art-world what they really wanted: Sylvia Ikkesett, not art.
Her new show featured absolutely nothing at all. She claimed that it was an inevitable conclusion to her way of working, which was either to paint everything she saw in extreme detail, or to paint nothing with equal detail, still regarding herself as a painter although she produced no paintings. She described these shows as artworks that reproduced, in detail, all the people that came to them, since, as they were there explicitly for her show, they were in fact her creations. And as reproductions of people that went to art exhibitions, they were as detailed as it was possible to get.
Her first show in this series was called Unseen-Black. She rented out a gallery space in the west end of London, painted the walls, the furniture, the ceiling, everything apart from the glass in the windows, black. The private view was full of those that had eagerly awaited her return, but they hadn’t read the invite properly, which told them to bring their own wine, as none, and nothing would be provided. Soon, someone had bought from a local pub as many bottles of cabernet sauvignon as they had, and the evening went extremely well. She didn’t turn up herself, but it was nevertheless a great success with only a few naysayers amongst the arterarty that congregated on that Thursday evening.
Five more exhibitions followed, with different colour themes in each: pink, orange, blue, yellow, and dark grey, each entitled Unseen- and then the colour, though the colour stated only related to the colour on show in the first exhibition. Thereafter, the colour on show and the name for the show seemed to become abstract notions which were not in any way related to each other, as lost in their meaning as she was distrustful of the power she had gained through her art.
They were held over a little more than a year, one every two months or so, and gained quite a large following, becoming known for their party atmosphere, where arty types would meet and discuss, mingle and network, all the while increasing Ikkesett’s renown. But again, she became tired of the format, and another period of silence ensued. A year after the last Unseen there was more excitement when a new show by Silvia Ikkesett was advertised in the art press, all the listings magazines, on websites, and in national papers. The date and time for the exhibition was given, but no details as to where the show was to take place, other than it would be somewhere in London. The show was called Never Seen, and even had one editorial written about it before it took place which speculated on the direction Ikkesett was now taking. A week before the show, a new advert appeared listing a number of websites where, two hours before the private view and opening of the exhibition was to take place, details of the venue would be given.
Excitement grew with this prospect, the imagination of those who couldn’t wait to go running riot with rumour and counter rumour as to where and what the show would be. Finally, later than advertised, only seventy-two minutes before its starting time of 5:30pm, the address of the venue was uploaded to the websites, causing one of them to crash with the huge surge in requests for data from their servers.
As expected, it was to be in the west end of London, in the heart of the old and moneyed contemporary art scene, Cork Street. But the number on the address was 39. There was, and is, no 39 Cork Street. By this time, excitement was at fever pitch, and hundreds of people descended on Cork Street looking for number 39. Outrage was restricted to a few tired individuals who had travelled hundreds of miles for the new show, but on the whole, the notion of an exhibition that didn’t exist was greeted with pleasure, and the local pubs saw a massive jump in their takings as they filled with the art seekers who had nowhere else to go.
One can only imagine Ikkesett’s disappointment at not being able to put a foot wrong. The show was hailed a success, a revolution in art thinking and examination of the very concept of the famous artist, but Ikkesett herself was nowhere to be seen. Two more shows followed, one in New York, and one in Newcastle, for reasons Ikkesett kept to herself – as far as anyone knew, she had no connections with Newcastle, and had never even been there. But maybe that was the point.
That was the last show she ever put on. She hasn’t been heard of since, even by her friends and family; she simply disappeared, vanishing as if her existence was as empty as the exhibitions she had masterminded. But there are those with a passion for the Unseen and Never Seen works that still keep an eye out for a new Ikkesett event, possibly advertised in a local paper, or on an obscure website, waiting for a time when she will come back once again.
I am ashamed to say that I had not heard of Sylvia Ikkesett until the first Never Seen exhibition took place. I went down to Cork Street along with all the others, and the atmosphere was fantastic, like a carnival or street party. I went with two friends, frequenting all the pubs in the area, talking to strangers all of whom seemed to be there for the show. It was quite a remarkable feat of advertising and marketing. But we must remember that had she not been Sylvia Ikkesett, no one would have turned up. And that was perhaps the point of these shows.
Her interest in the extreme led to her success, and necessitated her development. She was clearly unhappy with the recognition she had gained, and thought it a vacuous entity that she tried to extinguish by pointing out to all that gravitated towards her and her shows that fame is nothing. But far from lancing the boil, her Unseen shows simply accentuated her notoriety, making her even better known that she had been before.
Similarly, and perhaps with her foreknowledge, the Never Seen shows did exactly the same thing. But where does one go after that? The person to ask is nowhere to be seen, and cannot be found. Perhaps, one day, she will turn up again. But until then, it is worth remembering that her shows were indeed a microscopically accurate rendition of the types of people that caused her to flee the success she had made of herself.
We were all, on that night in Cork Street, her belongings, her artworks, which she displayed in the pubs and on the streets of the wealthy art dealers. It is a testament to her understanding of her situation that it was such a success, whether or not she wanted it to be. And in that case, we can see her as the great artist she always promised to be from her earliest days of painting portraits.
There are two threads to this piece: marketing and celebrity or fame. The whole point is to convince others of the existence of art regardless of the objects they are a witness to. So it is imperative that you confidently produce all the usual press releases and dates and times of the exhibition as you would for any other show, but without indicating in any way what they will see when they get there, or try to get there.
MATERIALS
• social media
• marketing
• advertising
• non-existent but plausible venue
STEP-BY-STEP
1.
Create a suitable venue.
A suitable pseudo-venue should be selected, one that is assumed to exist, so that it is not found out long before the event. If you find it difficult to flagrantly lie in this way, any number of marketing or advertising agencies could do that job for you.
2.
If you are not famous yourself, develop a fictitious character to attach the show to.
The reason why Ikkesett’s piece was successful was because she was Sylvia Ikkesett. Therefore, to re-create the show with any kind of authenticity, or success, one must have a name attached to it that will draw in the crowds. It is notoriously hard for unknown artists to get strangers to go to their shows, so it is imperative that, if you are not famous yourself, that you create a character whose life and art people want to be associated with. To do this you must spend considerable time developing a character, an artist as yet unknown, whose notoriety can be gained through social media, through blogging and writing self published essays or books, or through any number of other online means.
3.
Lead up to the idea for the show.
Once the character has been developed sufficiently, lead up to the idea for the show without being specific. They should not turn up expecting to see something that simply isn’t there, as their disappointment will ruin the work. The public should be able to recognise the train of thought that led to a non-existent show, once they are there, having been given the impression that being there at all is what is important, that being together at a time and place with others that are also expecting to witness some art, is in fact an artwork in itself.
4.
Advertise your show.
Advertise and market your show as you would any other to build up enough of a head of steam to re-create this piece in the spirit that it was first made.
Among the questions that challenged Arnold Tuppley as he continued to collect recipes while his delicate mental stability started to fragment like paint flaking off a badly primed canvas, was the question of whether or not anything can be art if it is seen by the public as having been anointed by an artist.
There was a lot going on in Tuppley’s life at this time. His career was continuing to grow thanks almost entirely to the work of Günter Hoffman; his friend and co-founder of LIBERART, Marco Chillds, had been found shot dead in Miami; and of course the investigation into Zara’s murder and the deaths of the Weisse twins was continuing in its slow journey towards a conclusion. But for Tuppley himself, the greatest tragedies were the twin losses of Carla Friedrich and his faith in art. Psychologically, he retreated back to nub of his existence as an artist and a human being, returning to the only question that continued to be of any real interest to him, of what art was and how it could be defined.
The idea that a work of art was only regarded as such because it was made by someone who called themselves an artist, or was called an artist by others, was not a new one to Tuppley. This, to Tuppley, was the point he could not get away from, and was something that he considered nullified many works which were well regarded by art lovers, and was one of the reasons he denied he was an artist in the first place. But the idea of trying to understand what art was, if indeed it was anything at all, by using art as a means to explore itself was a logical step to take, especially considering his recently finished recipe for Feedback Curve. And it was also the ultimate in concept art, the idea of art, as art.
He decided to create a process whereby anything could be made into art as a matter of course, since it had been through the process designated by an ‘artist’. He was well aware of the contradiction involved in creating such a mechanism himself, since he no longer perceived himself as an artist, and wrote, “I don’t make art anymore, just things, artefacts, but everyone is determined that I am, whatever I say. Who’s the bigger fool?”
It is clear to those reading his notes that the overall work was, as far as he was concerned, an artefact, something that resulted from his life, alone. But the objects that emerged from it could be regarded as art since they were nothing to do with him, they were explicitly to do with anyone who wasn’t him, anyone who chose to take part. In short, he wanted to create a machine that took in objects as artefacts from others’ lives, and spewed them out as art, having been transformed through the process he designed. The work he created he called Machine, but it was more popularly known as Confession. The concept, as he had hoped, was all important, but the manifestation of the work required a good deal of input from himself despite his unwavering objection.
Its form was that of a series of interconnected chambers, built within a larger sealed enclosure, a room within a room, the venue. There was one door in, and one door out.
This was the Machine.
An Applicant would enter with their artefact, and a little later on they exited with their newly consecrated work of art. The whole structure was contained within a rectangular area that filled most of the gallery, within which a tightly orchestrated series of events imposed an artistic value on the object the Applicant had brought with them.
The passage of the Applicant through Machine was strictly controlled by a series of electronic signs which dictated the next step they should take, aided by human helpers who were employed by Tuppley to ensure their smooth passage.
The first helper, designated the ‘Greeter’, stood outside Machine, waiting for the sign above the entrance to indicate that it was ready. She would then take the Applicant into the ‘First Room’, the anti-chamber to the ‘Interview Room’, where the Greeter would explain what the process was that they were about to go through. Then they would wait, if necessary, until the sign above the next door summoned them in to see Tuppley, whereupon the Greeter would open the door for the Applicant who was let into a long dimly lit space with a table, two chairs, one door to their left, and another behind Tuppley who sat on his own at the far end of the table, waiting.
On the whole they were arty types, some students, and a lot of middle aged women who enjoyed their art, and everyone, without exception, who was asked about their experience, recorded that at no time did Tuppley utter a single word. He would gesture, tap the table, and sit, sullen, and silent. The direction that the interview took followed exactly the same path for everyone.
After a brief period of initial confusion, possibly due to the low light levels while facing a rather stern and angry looking man dressed in a mourning suit sitting at the far end of the table, Tuppley would gesture to them to sit, if they hadn’t done so already, and to reveal the object they had brought in to be turned into art. Then they told him why. Tuppley would never ask, but left the Applicant to stew in their own silence, until they voluntarily explained themselves.
Once the Applicant had left the Interview Room, he took their artefact through the door behind him, left it on a small table, and wrote on a piece of paper the predominant emotion he felt was encapsulated by that object, and signed it. He then returned to the Interview Room and pressed another button that told the ‘Constructor’ to collect it. The Constructor then entered the small cubicle at the back of the Interview Room, which he called the Cold Room, through another door, and took the object and paper declaration back into the Constructorium from where he had come, and set about mounting it in a suitable frame or case depending on its size and relative dimensions, along with Tuppley’s declaration.
In his notes about the piece, he has scribbled over a section that reveals he considered having the Constructor return the housed artefact to the Cold Room for his final approval before taking it away again for the Applicant to collect. But he decided against this, writing underneath “as long as they believe I am who they want me to be, nothing I do matters.”
Once the object was suitably housed, the Constructor placed it in the Hot Room, ready for collection, returned to his station in the Constructorium to wait for the next piece, and pressed a button to indicate to Tuppley that the Applicant’s art was ready. Tuppley then pressed a button to inform the ‘Waiter’ who looked after the Applicant while their object was being turned into art, and on observing the sign above the door to the Hot Room from where they were waiting patiently, would lead the Applicant through to collect their art, and then out via the final door, back into the gallery proper.
The whole endeavour was designed so that Tuppley had complete control over what happened and when, without the need for him to say a single word. And he didn’t.
It got off to a slow start. The first few days saw only a trickle of people. The usual art exhibition obsessives who trawl the galleries, day in, day out, all across London, and the odd accidental passer-by who entered Machine with nothing, and had to have explained to them by the Greeter that if they had nothing of value to turn into art, they would have to leave through the door they had come in. But on the third day the numbers started increasing.
Word had got around on an internet forum for the bereaved. All of a sudden a succession of old woman, widows, and several grieving mothers who had lost a child and had no one else to turn to, arrived to use Machine. They queued up to transform a keepsake of their loved one’s into a work of art, to solidify their loss into an object that bore testament to their pain, as steadily, its popularity grew.
There was no religion involved, no god, and so the Applicants grew from the pool of London life that drew its population from all corners of the Earth to tell Tuppley what had happened to them, things done in the name of this, that, or the other, egged on by gods and prophets, dictators and freedom fighters, horrific crimes carried out by those they knew, who had lived on the same street, or they had been friends with, or even family. Machine was attracting tales of the most hideous tortures, of whole families being hacked to death, of rape repeated a thousand times, of body parts being hacked off and forced down the gullets of their owners. And in the middle of it all sat Tuppley, acting as some kind of priest at the heart of Machine, a confessional that allowed the Applicant to bare their rawest feelings, and tell their terrible tales, to the ‘artist’ who said nothing, made no comment, took no sides, and submitted no judgement.
It is a remarkable fact that most of these stories were never spoken of before Tuppley had turned them into art. Once out of Machine however, the Applicant, all too often during its latter stages leaving in tears, freely spoke of the torments they had suffered, that they had never spoken of to anyone before, but they now felt free to do so through the transformative process of Tuppley listening to them, accepting their story which was then turned into art through the transitional object they had brought with them as a witness, which in some cases was as insignificant as a scrap of material, or a single bead from a broken necklace.
Tuppley was becoming a dumping ground for the mental distress of others, piling their feelings onto him as he sat there, silently listening to the horrors they had suffered. But towards the end of the second week it became too much. Something snapped inside him, and he refused to go back.
At the time, no one had any idea what was going through Tuppley’s mind. At the end of the last day that Tuppley took part, a well dressed middle aged man entered, and left a little time later out of the door he had come through, to the surprise of the Greeter, Greta Sandhope, instead of leaving through the usual exit with his art.
When Greta went in to say goodbye to Tuppley, she found him cowered on the floor under the table, claiming he had dropped a pencil, but the truth we now know of what went on while Greta was clearing up the chairs outside was far darker.
We can learn a little of his reaction from his notebooks where he writes a single line before scribbling incoherently about light and a knife: “The Man has found me. He knows where I am. He knows where I am.” This signalled his collapse into paranoia that was to see him out to his last day.
The exhibition was closed two days before it was due to end, citing illness as a reason, but was nevertheless hailed a great success. Only a few days later the call came from Hoffman that because of Machine Tuppley had been shortlisted for a prestigious award, the Knott Art Prize, for which he would have to make one more work, which would prove to be his last.
This is an emotionally difficult piece to carry off well. The artist may have to listen to the most abominable aspects of human depravity, of tortures and violence metered out against the wholly innocent that they must concentrate on and accept without comment, regardless of their own feelings. It is not one for the faint hearted, as the story of Tuppley’s experience attests to. It is no surprise therefore that this piece has yet to be re-created.
MATERIALS
• 1 artist
STEP-BY-STEP
1.
Find or become a well respected artist.
For this piece, the most important component is the artist. You must be considered an artist of some repute, or use another artist who has sufficient gravitas to carry off the project.
2.
Find a venue and organise your Machine as you see fit.
You must provide a space where the applicant feels safe and valid, and can therefore bare their feelings without hindrance. How the space is organised and created is completely up to the re-creator of the piece since the art is in the concept, in the minds of those that take part, and not in how the Machine is constructed. Special attention should be made, however, to ensure a degree of privacy for the applicant. It is also important that however their artefacts are converted physically into the art they take away with them, that the process is not seen, so the transformation itself remains apparently mysterious.
Tuppley’s complex questioning of art and the artist led him down many paths, but the one question he never fully explored, though we can see it in his work and interests towards the very end of his life, is what is the true power of art?
The last work he created himself, which gained him the Knott Art Prize posthumously, we will not discuss since apart from the fact of its gruesome nature, the myriad headlines that swept the world’s media have left few who have never heard of Arnold Tuppley and the horrific finale to his career.
Instead, we will look at the last full recipe he collected of someone else’s work. It is a work which demonstrates definitively the power art can have, and in contrast to Tuppley’s own difficulties, is a life affirming glory of imagination and application from a man who combined his profession as a planetary scientist with his interest in art to produce a work which brought the whole world together to create an experience unlike any other.
It is an inspiring example of the power of art to transcend, as Tuppley believed all art must, and is therefore a perfect paradigm for what he believed art should be, and a just conclusion to the story of his efforts to define art and disseminate its greatest endeavours.
David Winterbottom was well known in scientific circles for his expertise in the atmospheres of planets. His initial interest, as a young man, was spurred by the environmental movement and his concern for the atmosphere we all live in, that paper thin veil that shrouds our planet in a life sustaining mixture of gases and water vapour, without which none of us would be here. His studies at university soon broadened his interests to look at the atmospheres of other planets too, initially Venus, concentrating his efforts on its composition, and the possible processes by which, from a starting point similar to that of the Earth, it became almost as uninhabitable and hazardous to life as it is possible to get.
In our own solar system there are only four rocky planets which can be said to have a definitive atmosphere, that being one that is contained on one side by the infinity of space, and on the other side by the solid surface of the ground, something that gaseous giants like Jupiter and Saturn can only aspire to. And so his studies, being limited in scope when looking at our own solar system, led him to examine planets which were being discovered orbiting suns many light years from ours.
During his studies for his doctorate in exo-planet atmospheric composition and temporal distortion, he started teaching and gained something of a reputation as an entertaining lecturer, which led to him being asked to demonstrate some of the aspects of different atmospheres in an exhibition held by a science museum in Ontario, USA. He built a number of small vessels to contain the right mixture of gases under the correct pressures and temperatures, with a coke can inside each vessel to show the corrosive and difficult atmospherics each planet possessed. The display he put on was such a success that he developed his planetary vessels alongside his aesthetic sense, exhibiting a number of new works as art.
The form of his first artistic works were much like his previous vessels, but soon he was given the opportunity to create larger works, works that housed his alien atmospheres in much larger structures, and into which, suitably dressed in pressure suits, people could enter, imagining themselves on alien worlds.
These proved a great success and drew crowds from all over the States, even though the cost of entry to the public was becoming astronomical due to the expense of dressing up the participants in NASA style space suits to control the forces of pressure and temperature that surrounded them in the chambers.
Then his big break came. He was approached to create a piece for a London show, the first time interest had been shown outside of the US, and he came up with his most ambitious project yet.
The technology he had developed for the airlocks and containment systems were well established, and could be reproduced without much cost, but establishing their content, this time, was not a case of calling a supplier of gases and liquids from the chemical industry, but instead involved the participation of the whole world.
Winterbottom set about recruiting other scientists at first, whom he had met over the years through his collaborations with various universities and other organisations, and then employed some others to travel the globe, and others still who lived in remote locations. He supplied them with identical kits to take large samples of the atmosphere, sealed in air-tight and very strong balloons, similar to weather balloons that are routinely used by meteorologists, and to return them to the location where the exhibit was to take place.
In due course, a high-ceilinged gallery in southeast London had a large air-tight glass walled chamber constructed inside it by a group of artisans that later became known as The Builders, and who have since built many a structure inside other structures for various artworks around the world.
The structure itself was twenty feet along each side, and ten feet high. On one side of the chamber was an airlock, a door that left the main chamber into a smaller chamber, what amounted to a porch, to ensure as little contamination of the interior air as possible, with suitable detectors in place within the vessel and airlock to keep watch over the comparative pressures and levels of carbon dioxide in order to maintain a safe environment for the public.
The venue started filling up with boxes that contained the balloons, full of air from all over the Earth, labelled with their origins, until the whole space outside the containment vessel left little room for manoeuvre. On the day before the exhibition opened, David Winterbottom arrived, opened wide the airlock doors and started, carefully, removing the balloons from their boxes before piling them into the main chamber.
There were a few casualties during the process. Deli was lost, as was Bristol, and San Lucas in Bolivia, but the majority of the balloons were successfully deployed into the vessel and squeezed in to expel as much of the native air from London as possible. The stage was set: a glass room built within a gallery, an air chamber, filled with beige coloured balloons that were squeezed in to fill almost all available space.
Winterbottom reserved the final task for himself. Both airlock doors were open, with the balloons squeezed inside the main chamber. He forced himself in with the balloons, and the inner airlock door was closed, sealing him in. The outer door was then also closed, and the air-tight worthiness of both doors established.
He was in, inside the chamber proper, inside the vessel that housed balloons containing air from all over the world. He reached into his trouser pocket and took out his wallet. From it, he retrieved an ordinary map pin, put his wallet back in his pocket, and with a large smile, according to those who witnessed the event, popped the first balloon, then the next, and the next, and another, and another... He continued in this fashion until the air from all 259 balloons had been released.
The squeezing in of the balloons had expelled the majority of the air already in the vessel, leaving around 10-15% southeast London atmosphere. The rest was now taken up by air from as far afield as the South Pole base in Antarctica, Lunsemfwa in Zambia, Zepu in Eastern China, Smelyy in Siberia, as well as all the other locations, some well known, others almost unheard of.
Due to the slightly higher pressure inside the balloons than normal air pressure, once the balloons had been popped the air pressure was maintained at a higher level inside the chamber than outside, which helped to prevent ingress of any more southeast London air with the opening and closing of the airlock as the air of the world tried to push outwards into the gallery. Added to this, The Builders had developed, for the first time in a Winterbottom piece, a system in the airlock that in a matter of a couple of seconds, sucked out a proportion of the London air inside the airlock, and then replaced it with air from inside the chamber. And on exiting the chamber the opposite would happen – the air from the world that was already in the airlock would be sucked back into the main chamber, and replaced with air from the surrounding gallery, thus ensuring as little contamination of the piece as possible.
When Winterbottom had finished popping all the balloons, he replaced the map pin in his wallet, and piled all the flaccid membranes inside the airlock, squeezing himself in with them. From outside, by the press of a button, the inner doors were closed and sealed, and then the outside doors of the airlock were opened. Winterbottom exited, and the remnants of the balloons were removed. The chamber was now ready, filled with at least 85% air from all over of the world.
Entry to the chamber was strictly controlled. As many people as possible were crammed into the airlock to minimise the amount of native air entering with them, but there was no avoiding the fact that with every passage of people from the outside to the inside, a certain amount of southeast London would enter the vessel and mix with the world’s air, a proportion of which would then be released on their exit again. There was no way around this dilution without considerable ‘world air’ reserves, which Winterbottom simply did not have. But nevertheless, the calculations were made and the proportion of world air was displayed continuously for all to see so that everyone was aware of what they were experiencing.
The exhibition was remarkable, a tremendous success, and a fillip to the environmental movement, the cause which endowed Winterbottom with his first interest in the subject, and he was justly proud.
Due to the slight but unavoidable dilution of the world air by the natural environment of southeast London every time the airlock was used, access to the chamber was strictly limited, but the reaction of those that were lucky enough to gain entrance was always one of delight. They tended to have a look of bemused pleasure on their faces initially as they danced or strolled around the space, breathing deeply the air from the world, discussing with each other what they imagined they could smell: spices from India; dampness from the Amazon; the dust of the Australian desert. After the initial excitement of their entrance they then tended to gather around the map on the opposite side to the airlock where the exact locations from where all the samples of air were taken had been marked. There were also photographs of some of the samplers at those locations so that they could see the people who helped bring about their experience and the work involved in bringing those samples thousands of miles to a small gallery in southeast London.
The event caught the public’s imagination to such an extent that even before it had closed new versions were already being planned which were larger, could incorporate more visitors, and some which had built in a factor for reserved world air supplies in order to maintain the full experience.
Once the percentage of world air had fallen below 25%, the doors of the gallery were opened to all, and the airlocks released to allow the air in the chamber to freely mix with the atmosphere of southeast London.
The exhibition drew headlines from across the world, and was the first time that a work of art had had an impact on a global scale. But not everyone was happy as politics heaved its heavy bulk into view, and various countries restricted the export of air, seeing Winterbottom’s exhibit as a colonial attack on their sovereign rights to their own atmosphere. But aside from these gripes, exclusively from dictatorships that bore a hatred for the West, his work was seen as a great expression of the interest of the peoples of Earth in the world they live on, a world whose atmosphere is but a few short miles high, a distance you could travel by car in less than half an hour, a naked, flimsy film of gas that we all, from whatever country, in whatever corner of the Earth we reside, depend on for our lives.
The ultimate in Air re-creation is to build a chamber and fill it with a minimum of 256 air samples taken from all over the world. It is possible, however, to create a version of this piece that is smaller in scope, looking closer to home for your samples, perhaps concentrating on the country you live in, or sampling a city or village to then exhibit in another part of the country, but it would create a more limited experience. Be under no illusion that to gather samples of air from all over the world is in any way easy regardless of what one does with them afterwards. So if you are determined to perform a full re-creation, be prepared for a lot of hard work recruiting samplers and gaining permissions before you think about finding a venue and constructor for the piece.
MATERIALS
• samplers, as many as you can get
• air sampling kits, one for each sampler
• glass walled airtight chamber with airlock
• map of locations from where the samples were taken
• any ancillary materials to aid explanation of the samples and to display within the chamber
STEP-BY-STEP
1.
Build, manufacture, or buy air sampling equipment.
There are many possible ways of collecting the air samples required for the piece, and how or where you get them is entirely up to you. There are commercially available solutions, if you have the funding, and some home made style designs are also available if you look online. But bear in mind factors such as how to post your sampling kits to all corners of the globe, and that highly pressurised containers cannot be transported by air in order to get them sent back to you. And however the samples are contained, they must be within a tested airtight vessel that can either be collapsed itself, once inside the exhibition chamber, or can have its content safely siphoned off into a balloon which can then be used inside the chamber, as Winterbottom did.
2.
Recruit samplers from around the world.
Once you have the method for gaining your samples organised, start recruiting your samplers. This can be achieved relatively easily through social media, though you must be careful to ensure that those you recruit are serious about their task, and are not likely to provide samples of other gases, whether toxic, inert, or produced bodily.
3.
Build you world-air chamber.
There’s no way around the fact that this is not something you can do yourself; you will need professional engineers to construct the chamber. Winterbottom used the group now known as The Builders to build his chamber. But failing that, getting a professor of mechanical engineering from a local university is a good way to get undergraduates and a younger generation involved as well as a little publicity, though a re-creation of Winterbottom’s Air tends to attract publicity whenever one is created.
The details for the chamber’s construction will vary depending on the nature of the venue and the ease with which components can be installed, so there is no specific recipe for the chamber itself. But whoever is responsible for its construction, they must ensure a suitable working airlock, and have installed detectors for the air pressures in the airlock and main chamber, as well as oxygen and carbon dioxide measuring equipment to ensure no one comes to any harm during the show.
The art recipe has become a force of democratic creativity and innovation unlike anything previously experienced by the art-world, which has seen many important new works of art come to the attention of a wider audience by previously unknown, or unrecognised, artists. It has also seen the exponential rise in respect for those most important of people, the makers, whose previously unsung achievements have been elevated to at last be recognised for the true worth that they exhibit. Their achievements in particular, their ability to create out of ordinary or extraordinary objects, things of beauty and high philosophy, from the designs of their more artistic employers, is a lesson to us all that we not take for granted the existence of the art we all enjoy.
It behoves us all to remember that behind any work of art, whether created by the artist themselves or a highly skilled maker, there is a human being who has put their all into the works we seek out for our own edification. And for all of this, for the democratisation of art itself, there is one man we have to thank more than any other – Arnold Tuppley.