The installation is made up of found objects sourced from the authorities in charge of the area. The objects have been lost and handed in and then docketed. I can hardly believe that anyone would have bothered to hand in a dropped comb, although the hearing aid was certainly credible – and I could imagine the distress of the owner. The items are hung on threads from the darkened ceiling and are partially lighted by spotlights. There are labels, legible with a bit of effort. How many exhibits are there? Maybe 40 or so, including garments. Visitors make their way through the threaded items, pausing from time to time to read captions.
We are in a designed space, specially arranged by the organisers. We are asked to pay attention, in the first instance to the items and to their titles. What are they exactly and where are they from? We probably also notice that we have to bend down and peer to read the inscriptions and to take care as we work our way through. Sculpture usually asks us to pay attention and to move around looking from this and that angle. We hold onto the handrail and lean forward to read details and to look at the inscription. That is also true of paintings in a gallery (and of supermarket stock, too), but is especially the case with objects on plinths and behind guardrails. So I become aware of carrying out a kind of responsive dance routine, turning, pausing and bending.
What I was offered was a regulated experience lasting for a matter of minutes – five or six minutes or more. Normally I don’t stop to consider just how I spent the last five minutes, but in that kind of managed environment self-awareness is inevitable. I stop, look, reach and read maybe half a dozen of more times until I became used to the experience or got the hang of it. I speeded up towards the end and then began to look for more enigmatic items, such as the hearing aid that looked like a tusk with a metal attachment. I returned to look for more mystery objects. I, or anyone else in my position, would have seen that it was a managed situation, carefully tabulated in terms of gestures and movements – and different kinds of awareness, such as looking, reaching, touching and reading.
The whole thing could be seen as an exercise in perceiving, as sequenced and orderly. I go through such sequences daily without thinking about it, as in waiting for a bus and watching for a relevant number and then moving my body towards the expected stopping point. Life is made up of these performances, perceiving and shifting, usually taken for granted. The exhibition was like a set of instructions borrowed from daily life and held up for inspection – a kind of dance pattern founded on everyday experience.
Why should I want to be reminded of just how I act routinely in real life? Well, it might be a good thing for me to be reminded that I do ‘’act’’ or have regular and common ways of doing things – and that they are both my ways and your ways.
Art time is or can be slowed time – maybe it has to be that. The low lighting in the gallery meant that I had to look twice and carefully. A comb, for instance; I could imagine it greasy and congested with a ridge of loose hair. But it had been cleaned and was pristine, like an ideal comb (in Boots). The hearing aid, too, was in what looked like good condition – as was the discarded walking pole – they normally come in pairs, don’t they? So my next step is to wonder just what kinds of objects they are; lost property, the texts say. I know what lost property is, but there are many different kinds of objects kept in all sorts of places (pantry shelves, bathroom cupboards). Lost property is not always litter, although it could become that. There is a sequence here involving litter, rubbish, and debris. Lost property is waiting on the edge to be reincorporated into active or useful life. Lost property reminds me of other kinds of things chosen to appear in art - such as the kinds of loose words and advertising motifs you find in Dada or the grungy objects you might expect in Abject Art. Dada objects often look to me like shattered bits and pieces you would come across after an explosion – and with the Great War in mind it was an age of explosions and of disruptions. Abject Art in the ‘70s was deliberately sordid, a kind of mock-heroic. Lost Property, though, is something else – on the threshold of normal life, just waiting to find its place again. It can still be used. Going out of doors, leaving the gallery on the exhibition site, which is a converted farm, with stables, a farmyard and a horse trough, I could see that I was in a re-used and adapted setting – a kind of lost or abandoned property that had been put to new uses. So, maybe ‘’lost property’’ refers to contemporary conduct in which we put existing materials and settings to new uses, we adapt and re-evaluate: fields and clearings become car-parks and a row of pig-sties serve as a gallery – and a barn as a café. Maybe, that is to say, we are now gradualists whereas in the period around 1918 we expected sudden and large changes – ruin and reformulation, starting from scratch.
The exhibition made me, for a while, self-aware. That was its function. Coming out and walking around in the courtyard, on the grooved boards, I came across a dropped toy car: a red Mercedes sports car with left hand steering, 7 cm. long, a pressed number in a panel underneath and the word CHINA. I should have handed it in as ‘’lost property’’ but put it in my pocket. From time to time during the day I remember idly touching it in the darkness, turning the wheels with my thumb or putting a fingernail into a wheel socket. It made me into some kind of imagined giant in whose hand a car might fit. Think of that famous portrait by Alec Soth, from the Mississippi Dreaming book, of the tall man holding model aircraft making him look like a giant from a story. There is another portrait in that book of a man in an over-large suit, which presents him as shrunken or as a miniature. The exhibition made me think of that kind of casual and entertaining magical transformation, maybe the kind of sense that is always latent, always ready to show itself.
I could think of Forest as a Creation (or re-creation) Story – or verging on one. There was, for example, an orthopaedic or restorative aspect to the specimens, even an actual ‘’orthopaedic’’ shoe. Perhaps someone had been cured magically in the woods and had cast aside the helpful shoe? There was a (plastic) pistol pointing to an explosive and malicious end of everything - in addition to ruined spectacles (eye-glasses) and other signs of life and to the decay of life – such as the Norwegian walking pole to keep you in condition and to stave off immobility. If only there had been a set of false teeth – too much to hope for probably.
One of the virtues of Forest is that it is in a real-life setting. When you emerge at the far end you enter a former farmyard, with that impressive water-trough, sculptural by any standards, another sign of life and of someone’s ingenuity – its stony concrete core has been sheathed in metal to protect the legs of horses as they leaned forward. It complemented the display inside? How exactly? Well, it was just another useful item on the everyday roster – something to think about. Perhaps with a circular trough you can water more horses at once? It didn’t have to be about anything in particular but it held out a promise or even just a suggestion that things could be thought about in relation to each other. One of the problems of galleries proper is that they exclude all of these systematic and suggestive bits and pieces from the everyday. Forest, I thought, was (and still is) continuous with the unremarked-on life I usually lead – like everyone else.
Forest just asks you for your attention for a while. To begin with you probably just wonder at how such things could be lost or mislaid or abandoned. Then you might begin to notice just how you look and investigate your own way of looking – how you pause and consider. It is like a second stage in the process where you become aware that there are further stages and a different kind of thinking and considering. With any luck the impulse will stay with you for a while and keep you from relapsing into your general normal ways. Later in the day, or maybe the next day, we went to a natural cemetery, really a bit of field converted into a graveyard. All the stones were flat at ground level, and there was a whole table of instruction as to what could and couldn’t be done – mainly the latter. I thought of conventional graveyards where you stand upright or incline a little to read names on a standing stone. There is a meaning in that if I could lay my hands on it. Then on the edge of Rutland Water, I think it is called, we walked along a track and I saw a long smoothed lawn, a curving path, some trees and a novelty seat in the shape of a reclining cow (a Friesian in black& white). The elegant arrangement belonged to a biggish house at the top of the slope and I noticed that there was a recently installed hedge near to the track - to keep passers-by out of sight. That, too, was an example of rudimentary thinking about such arrangements. That is to say, the exhibition was a prompt to constructive analysis, putting things together. It helps to get us into the habit of looking, sorting and weighing things up.
IJ 2020-02-05
