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.
