1990

‘Thoughts on a time gate’ was made from tightly rolled newspaper pages bound together gummed paper, and constructed to form a space-frame. The construction is similar to that of the Folk Chair of the previous year, and like that, it is intended to symbolize the means of its own construction. By turning the pages of newspapers (the usual purpose of which is to signify things as objects, for the currency of the press) into a symbolic structure, then all these thoughts that constitute the work are given freedom to play and interact outside of linear time. In other words, they form a time gate in space.

But both this work and the Folk Chair have yet a deeper symbolical intent. They are intended to wrench an ancient symbol – the bundled rods or Fasces – out of the grip of Fascism, and return it to what I conjecture would have been its original condition. My thinking is this, that many thousands of years ago, before humans developed the flow of linear speech that came to objectify and dominate the world, their languages would have been less narrow. Narratives would not have flowed through the gorge of time as objects in a torrent, but rather would have been presented as things bound together so that the means or meaning of an event could be grasped or comprehended. Such a means of communicating broadly speaking would have been the fasces – a bundle of things tied together – the symbol that carried in it the understanding of its own construction. But over time language became associated with power, and the multi-faceted nature of the fasces was reduced to birch rods (and axe) which symbolized the crude power of Fascism.

As I mentioned in the description of the Folk Gate of 1989, that work collapsed, as perhaps it was meant to so that I could say now that, if the giant chair had been made of a variety of different materials bound together instead of simply coppiced elder stems, (which dried out) then the structure might not have collapsed, and that symbol of colloquial symbolics might still remain.