I made this proposal to coincide with the opening of the new Scottish Parliament in 1999. The artwork would involve me travelling in a straight line between the House of Commons in London and the new Scottish Parliament House in Edinburgh. Here is the press release from that time:
“292 years have passed since the union of the Scottish and English parliaments in 1707. In the following months, before and after the opening of the Scottish parliament, artist Stan Bonnar will make a journey, on which he will paint two hundred and ninety two acrylic paintings on synthetic silk.
“Mapmakers will define the straightest possible line between the Speaker’s chair of the House of Commons in London, and the site of the new Parliament house at Holyrood in Edinburgh. (The line passes through Camden and Barnet London Boroughs, Luton, Bedford, Rushton, Corby, Bradford, Radcliffe on Trent, Mansfield, Shirebrook, Aston, Rotherham, Barnsley, Wakefield, Morley, Pudsey, Leeds, Haltwhistle, Hawick, Bonnyrigg & Lasswade and Edinburgh.)
“Starting at the house of Commons on January 1st 1999, Bonnar will follow this mapped line to Edinburgh. Wherever it passes through the wall of a significant building, he will set up an artist’s easel, and from a viewing distance of 1 metre, will make a representational painting of a small square section of that wall.
“In cities, towns and villages, the walls of government offices, multi-national companies, large stores, financial institutions, television and newspaper offices, cinemas, art galleries, churches, libraries, large farms, small businesses, and private houses will be represented. The walls will be chosen because of the publicness of their location, and to stimulate local interest in the project.
“On the journey north, each completed painting will be removed from its frame, and sewn to the others already completed. In this way, a huge patchwork flag, similar to the Saltire flag of Scotland, will emerge from the walls. It will be unfurled in Edinburgh in the first minute of the new millennium. But population difference means that this ‘Other’ flag of Scotland would be created by more people in England than in Scotland. It will be an anxious Saltire, a symbol as much for the democratic aspirations of its English Other, as it will be for Scottish democracy.
“Each small section of the flag will be a symbol for the discussions that take place in the street about its painting. The more public interest there is in this ‘painting of hidden views’, the more potent will be the symbolic value of the flag. The work aspires to open a democratic space, and it seeks this by asking for its visual language to be questioned. To question the justification for these acts of painting is to create this work of art – the democratic voicing of a new symbolic language, that might germinate in the space between the painting and the question.”
I also made this submission statement for funding agencies, discussing the philosophy of the artwork. It begins with a quotation from Simon Critchley’s work ‘The Ethics of Deconstruction’…
‘Democracy does not exist; that is to say, starting from today, and every day, there is a responsibility to invent democracy, to extend the democratic franchise to all areas of public and private life.’
A dichotomy exists between the letter and the aspirations of our systems of art and democracy. Democratic thought is ethical thought, but because of the voracity of modern spoken languages, which appropriate physical things as objects, the ethical impulse of the democrat is always diluted by the flow of her own words.
However, by the same token, democratic thought seeks to deconstruct the language structure in which it’s aspirations are voiced. It lays its own practical democratic structure open to the unpredictable proximity of the other. This is the democratic aspiration.
In recent years, through deconstructive practice, artists have sought to interrupt the limits of functioning social structures, and to interrogate the totality of their languages and timebase. Paradoxically however, this ethical activity has been hampered by its linguistic determination as Art, which impedes deconstruction and inhibits art thought from finding a viable public form.
This experimental work, Mythogram 292 walls, will seek to open a continuum in which people can take a step back from Art. In opening an environment for a public debate, it might be possible to graft the democratic and ethical aspirations of deconstructive thought into Art, by mediating the voracity of public speaking with the artist’s anxiety for the object. This type of art (no capital) may initially be encountered as once was expected – as an artist at work, a painter sitting at an easel – a traditional public representation of artist and art object. This initial objectification might quickly give way to curiosity about the apparent dislocation of the artist from the view that lies behind a wall! The natural question ‘what is going on here?’ asked by any passer-by, would open dialogues at 292 locations, questioning the question ‘What is it?’.
By questioning the question, ‘what is it?’ painting becomes an act of linguistic signification that raises the issue of signification for public debate. The paintings of Mythogram 292 walls are not Art objects that point to their own linguistic dysfunction, for if this were the case, they would easily become prey to appropriation or capitalisation by the Art language structures they seek to interrogate. The paintings are part of an art act that is itself part of a tendency towards democracy in art, and they exist only to deliver a public space in which the democratic decision can be aspired to. The artist has called this tendency a mythogram, a clearing for the writing of stories whose symbols spell themselves pluri-dimensionally. A deconstructive continuum for ethico-political decisions. A tendency to open democratic space, and to see beyond the walls of monolithic or immanent social structures.
In a mythogram, all language structures are vulnerable to the unpredictable approach of others – democratic art thought enables this. By publicly raising the issue of signification, art submits Art to the justice of public debate; but by the same token, the scope of such debate will also cover all similar social structures that present themselves in the breath of the debaters. Because the content and aesthetic of each painting is exterior to the frame, the painting can be made to symbolise the debates which it gives rise to. It carries these deconstructive decisions forward in itself as the meaning of its democratic aspiration. When these are sewn together to create a grand and almost monumental flag, the degree to which the graft has taken will be marked as the very anxiety of this public art object. The flag is not the Saltire of Scotland. The diagonal cross is rather the foreboding shadow of totalitarian politics on the democratic aspiration, cast when democracy is allowed to stagnate, and when power has no reference to the other.
