By 1972 I had applied to Teacher Training College…
During my five years at Art College, the greater task of parenting our son Mark had been Rosi’s. While doing this, she had also worked hard as a manager in the School Meals service in Dundee. So by the time I graduated, we were hoping that I would begin to pay my way by teaching art in one of the Secondary Schools in Dundee. But this is not what happened.
David Harding had been working for a number of years as the ‘Town Artist’ with Glenrothes New Town Development Corporation. During that time he had made many artworks for the town (which are well documented elsewhere.) I remember Chalky saying that this guy who worked as an artist somewhere in Fife was looking for an assistant – a graduate from one of the Scottish Art Colleges, who would live in Glenrothes, be paid for one year by the Development Corporation to assist David, and also more importantly to me, get to make an artwork of their own for the town.
DING DONG!
In those days this sort of thing just did not happen. You were an artist, you went to Art College, then you spent your days teaching art and your nights trying to say what your art needed you to say. And here was this guy with a beard offering me the chance to make art and get a salary for it – you bet I jumped at the chance!
We moved to a smart new corporation house in an area of Glenrothes called Pitteuchar. Mark started primary school, and we made lots of friends. I bought my first motor bike – a BSA Bantam, and chugged off to work each morning at the Corporation artist’s studio. David made us very welcome and I did my best to help with his projects, but what to make as my art contribution to the new town? I mean, in the rarefied atmosphere of the sculpture department, I had been used to suspending things on nylon fishing line, but in the Scottish Young Contemporaries exhibition I’d seen how easily such works could be destroyed.
Nevertheless, it was not possible for me to abandon the basic idea of momentary reiteration, neither was it possible for me to ignore my need to make simple, gliding shapes in space. I just had to make something more robust and sociable…
thinking…
…in reality this is just a quintet …a concert of concrete hippos that kids like to play on …that’s what they are …that’s the way we understand them in reality. But how do we actually under-stand with them …as the constituents of a common being …for this is what we ‘common beings‘ (including human) must try to visualise in the half-light given to us by the paradox of quantum entanglement …that things like hippos are not ‘out there’ as such …but rather, they are actually in here.
I am alterity as alterity is me …that is the moment of our common being.
I made a prototype hippo in plaster of paris. After it had dried out fully, I sealed it with shellac and beeswax, and after a further application of blue PVA separating agent, was ready to take GRP moulds from the prototype (using Plasticene then plaster to make the mould walls). In the photo above, you can see one of the mould sections stuck to its rear end and plaster bits stuck to the front legs. The finished GRP mould sections were then drilled for bolting together prior to removal from the prototype form. As far as I know, this was all original technique.
The empty mould was then transported to a small hut on the building site in Pitteuchar. Meanwhile, four internal reinforcing frames had been made from 10mm steel, and one of these was suspended upside down from the rafters of the hut, around which we then reassembled the GRP mould supported on blocks of expanded polystyrene. Concrete (4:2:1) was then poured into the oiled GRP moulds and left to set for a couple of days before disassembly. Then we moved on to the next rafter of the small rickety hut and repeated the process. Two concrete hippos each weighing a ton were hanging upside down from the rafters. We made three more hippos after that – so there was a total of five tons of upside down hippos hanging there the night that a gale struck the east of Scotland and blew the hut down!
But look, we had got this far, and with the help of a JCB, we extricated the concrete hippos from the wreckage of the hut. They were then transported to the site where they still are today – much loved by the people – so much so that they recently became the Town’s official mascot.
writing…
If the task of art is to challenge the status quo and to shake the complacency of language, how is this task accomplished by the hippos? And if the purpose of the challenge is to modify language so that justice might prevail, how is that purpose fulfilled by the hippos? Let us look at the above photograph and imagine that the hippos are not there; we can see that what’s left is perhaps quite unremarkable…
‘just the corner of a house, some concrete block-work, a wooden fence and a bush’.
These words which I’ve just used are so easily said because they belong to the world they describe – which is the same world as I live in. For example, if I live in the house on the corner, I might say that I live in a two storey house with a roughcast finish, opposite a wooden fence and beside a bush. These are the objects with which I make sense of my environment and I don’t necessarily think of them as art. They all fit together to form the world at the corner of the street in which I live, and I don’t normally give them another thought.
The problem is that the words we use to describe our worlds do not sit comfortably with who we are as humane beings. They cannot, for worlds are the means by which we advance the human cause at the expense of others – those unnamed things, awkward and unpredictable but ultimately categorized and subjugated in the dominion of speech. We must do this, we have no choice, it is the way of the world, but that it has returned to haunt us in the cloak of so many environmental emergencies, means that we must try to speak more thoughtfully with the awkwardness of things and not about them as the ideal objects of our dominion.
And that is surely where the indomitable hippos come in. At least inscrutable, perhaps sullen or even angry, they are not the subjugated objects of our world-at-the-corner, to be made diaphanous and ideal by the breath of speech. They are the avatars of living creatures and the embodiment of an idea. Hippos do not come round corners in Glenrothes, there is no predicate for this mode of being – the sentence that would contain them has already been destroyed. That these concrete hippos are dislocated from their usual habitat is their strength and meaning. They are the thing, the otherness which demands that we justify our will to dominate them – the Glenrothes hippos stand for linguistic justice.
But if all this is true, would one hippo not have done the job just as well as five hippos? Well not really because ‘it’ would more easily become the object (of subjugation) whereas with five, one cannot exactly be sure of where one’s attention is to aim. There is no such thing as ‘a hippo’ – and that is the very point. These are reiterations of the moment, and because of that they are not merely sited in an environment but rather they are part of it – the part that creates the work of environmental art. Each has a slightly different under-standing with the house, the fence, the bush and the block-work, and that’s what sets up the artwork to be greater than the sum of its parts.
So what is this art – so important that it has taken the greater part of my life just to scratch at its surface? It is about the nature of things and about asking the specific question, do things exist in time and space as the objects of language, or are things actually the under-standing that creates its own time and space? I think that quantum entanglement shows the latter to be more exact than the former.
Each hippo is a moment of under-standing-with the others that surround it (including ourself) – a moment of justice for the objects of the world. The hippos release us to our common thing-hood – now we just have to comprehend what that actually means.
