Placing the Artist Gass Pendergast
Living Room Lewis Russel Hall
Gass Pendergast is a curator based in Manchester, he was artist in residence at 501 Art Space, Chongqing, China October-November 2011. Placing the Artist is a sceptical yet resiliently positive look at the changing nature of artist residencies. Lewis Russell Hall is a writer originally from Yorkshire; he has spent the last 6 years living in Taiwan. Living Room could at a stretch be seen like the publication of Rene Descartes Meditations, a chance for the less fortunate to walk in the footsteps of one who has been afforded the luxury of an artist residency, on the other hand it is a work of fiction, its only connection to residencies and Chongqing being arbitrary.
Placing the Artist ‘We are at a moment, I believe, when our experience of the world is less that of a long life developing through time than that of a network that connects points and intersects with its own skein’. Michel Foucault ‘Of Other Spaces’ 1967
There has been an undeniable rise in the number of artist residencies and considerable changes to the way they function. The critical response to this initially crawled behind and as a result artists and institutions were left to understand and communicate their projects in the language of funding applications. The dialogue now starting to form seems to have leaped too far to catch up and in doing so overlooked some significant steps. There has also been an increase in the number of philosophically and politically driven residencies, only accepting artists on to their programs that fit with their motivations. Institutions can play an important role in supporting artists who incorporate a desire for social change into their practice, but there is a problem when an artist wishing to undertake a residency feels obliged to take on the mantle of world saving ambassador from El Dorado. The latest major funding opportunity for residencies comes from a £750,000 relationship between Arts Council England and the British Council, an organisation recently under fire for its involvement with London Book Fair and the decision to only invite authors that wouldn’t upset relations with the Chinese Government and the financial benefits they enable (Nick Cohen, 2012). Whilst an increasing number of people are aligning themselves and their identities with cities, theories and networks, before nationality, how should artists feel about supporting the British Council’s task of promoting Britishness abroad? It is frequently acknowledged in casual conversation and voiced at more formal events that artists are exasperated and frustrated with having to talk the talk, to justify their projects within a limited vocabulary of inclusion and
development. ‘Great Art for Everyone’ is clearly an oxymoron perhaps ‘Great Art for Anyone’ would be more genuine, though not quite as snappy. It is nonetheless all too easy to throw stones at the Arts Council. Arts Council England (ACE) needs the help of artists not so they can just continue to fund projects like this one but so they can fund better ones. Boring as it sounds, the evaluation in many ways may be more important than the application. For example, in response to the recent funding cuts to many former regularly funded organisations, A-N Magazine commissioned Dany Louise to carry out in depth research into what affect this might have on the local and national arts ecology. A key aim was to ‘Urge ACE and other arts funders to consider the arguments in this paper when shaping and developing policy and making future funding decisions’ (Louise 2011). Though not every artist should feel the need to become a researcher, it must still be acknowledged that ACE simply can’t be expected to get funding decisions right on their own. Whilst those on the frontline marched forward into the ‘no man’s land’ of new and exciting residency models, most of us were left behind wondering who they are for and what they should be aiming to achieve? Work needs to be done to communicate between all those involved, in order to move residencies forward on the foundations of a critical genealogy. During ‘Placing the Artist, Questioning the Value of Artist Residencies’, an event at Chinese Arts Centre (01.03.2012), Manchester based artist and curator Mike Chavez-Dawson talked through a number of residencies he had initiated and undertaken, picking out a number of the dynamic roles an artist can play in these situations. He also expressed a belief that a fundamental outcome of a residency is the continued development of an artist’s ability to instigate and respond to new and ever varying situations. He calls this ‘Creative Agility’. It can’t be denied that artists benefit from residencies, even if you have a terrible time you will come back fighting fit and with stories to tell. But does this alone warrant international travel? In schools, children are sometimes asked to make what is known to their teachers as ‘Morphological Forced Connections’( Koberg, Bagnall 2003) a creative thinking technique used equally by big business, scientists and policy makers. In a creative writing class they may first be asked to list a series of attributes for potential characters for example, six kinds of haircut, six kinds of physique or six personality traits. Then a dice is rolled to give a random combination. This way the children arrive at a character for their story; one
they may not have otherwise created. Perhaps in a similar sense, lured by the promise of fresh inspiration, artists spin a globe, pick themselves up and drop themselves down on the other side of the planet. Thus the artist in residence can habitually be seen putting together the surprising and the arbitrary to make patient fat men with long blonde hair and short bald women who are very good at singing. The understanding that responding to place is difficult, even impossible and often simply contrived is nothing new. The problem outlined by many artists and critical thinkers from Henri Lefebvre to Claire Doherty is what usually happens is that place is taken to be its abstracted representations. The focus becomes the remains of Manchester’s industrial past or our wet climate, rather than what is activated by the people who live here. My intention is not to pick out any individuals or organisations, just to say that some healthy scepticism should be encouraged when artists decide to make a piece of work in Liverpool about the Beatles or in Manchester about football or Mancunian phrases that few people actually use. It is not to say that these are necessarily bad works of art, but that there is something wrong with them being understood and valued as a response to place. There are of course many examples of artists making this problematic relationship the subject of their work. When Francis Alys declared himself a tourist for hire, made his own sign and stood with groups of local labours in Mexico, he was at once with them yet forever a ‘Gringo’ (Francis Alys, Tourist, 1996). Whether arriving in a foreign country or somewhere only a train ride away, an artist in residence finds their experiences of the new environment, to some extent, mediated by the organisers of the residency program. Considering that most institutions are already struggling to communicate to the audiences they want to, this can leave artists twice removed from the local population. As well as relocation the other main determining factor of a residency is time. How long should a residency be? 1, 2 or 3 months? How long does it take to benefit from or contribute to another place and how long before you are just living there? Should an artist wait until the exotic has become mundane before acting or thrive on the sensation of incomprehensible collision? During my residency at 501 Art Space, I carried out a project called ‘The Foreigner’s House’. I worked with local artists, students and members of the
public to transform the large, empty studio space I was given, into something that was at once a fun, comfortable living space, exhibition space and also still working space. I encouraged people to make contributions in the form of suggestions, designs, collaborations or donations (objects, artworks, foodstuffs, decorations, furniture). As well as playing with my simultaneous roles as artist, curator and resident I also wanted to put the inherent contradiction of trying to make myself at home whilst knowing that soon I would be leaving at the centre of my project. I imagined that I would be increasingly ‘at home’ in Chongqing up until the point when I left. That the point when I was most at home, the point when I was most aware of how to best function there, would be the very point when I left. I wanted to acknowledge this by titling the final exhibition ‘House Warming Party’. Realising that temporality and incompleteness are intrinsic to being in the world (with help from Heidegger), I wanted to celebrate all that is problematic about marking a work or exhibition complete or indeed incomplete. Naturally this can have a greater poignancy in the context of a residency where there is the potential to feel that things are prematurely brought together by its arbitrary end point. Maybe the romantic ideal of the artist residency is long gone. Rather than time out of a hectic life to reflect on one’s practice, they have become a CV building opportunity; less a change of pace more a quickening of pace. As a result artists in residence are often told they shouldn’t feel under pressure to produce work during a residency. This is obviously well intended but it shouldn’t be forgotten that the artist has made a commitment to the organisers and themselves, given up time and made a personal investment into this new relationship. There will now always be a level of pressure on an artist in residence, maybe this should be enjoyed rather than superficially softened. There are many organisations on the front line, challenging the traditional restrictions of an artist residency, notably Grizedale Arts who initiate residencies with no predetermined end point, along with putting trips to the pub and time spent tending the vegetable patch at the heart of their program. Chinese Arts Centre has long understood that a residency may just be the beginning of a relationship, with artists returning years later to play
different roles in their program. A number of artist led groups in Manchester will soon be taking a critical perspective on the ways they want to use residencies to support the work of artists and curators, such as the Lionel Dobie Project and Rogue Project Space. One thing I feel there is too little room to discuss further here is where the audience comes into this beyond the obligatory open studio and the potential for members of the public to participate in an artist’s residency. For this I would look to Kerenza McClarnan and ‘Buddleia’ soon to launch another socially engaged artist residency programme in Manchester. Instead, an open ended question, one I feel should be continually asked by those running residency programs and those wishing to undertake them. What are the wider benefits of residencies beyond the artist’s personal and professional development? Of course there would be nothing without ‘Creative Agility’ but when the internet can send information to the other side of the globe faster than any £800 plane ticket, what do residencies offer the arts that tourism doesn’t? Though he may not have been the first person to say it, Eli Pariser ended my faith in the essential democracy of the internet during what many would argue is an example of the internet at its best, one of the now infamous ‘TED talks’. His concept of ‘Filter Bubbles’, is a direct challenge to the assumption that the internet has a simple survival of the fittest mentality, where search results are dependent on the most relevant and most popular, where the internet is a neutral space for people to acquire knowledge and interact with each other. ‘…even if you are logged out there are 57 signals that Google looks at…to personally tailor your query results’. (Pariser, 2011).When we enter the internet we all enter at different points and in different ways with different results, even if we feel we may be looking for the same thing. The internet like exhibition space, like the network of artist residency programs and unquestionably the rest of the world, is never neutral space. From wherever we stand we are always, already within a heavily populated and biased space which we experience subjectively. Many maintain a belief that freedom is defined and expressed by the individual and that it is possible to mentally and physically distance yourself from that which you don’t agree with. Many others have come to understand this to be part of a perverted
conception of freedom, resulting from a hundred years of advertising and government propaganda informed by psychoanalysis. The ideology of late capitalism continually perfects it’s ability to present you with a hollow effigy of freedom whilst actions of activism serve only to maintain the status quo. The individual is encouraged to feel free, to indulge his or her own desires and say what s/he likes but rarely to change a thing. Artists cannot simply choose to step outside of this in order to critique or communicate from a more genuine position. There is though, something resiliently positive about the belief in a world where people make art, this affords artists the potential to be forever sceptical in a way that remains positive. Without having to declare themselves socialists, eco-warriors or negotiators for world peace, artists who believe in themselves as artists may spread the most powerful memes (Dawkins, 1976) for a better world. Making connections whilst affirming diversity (the language of a funding application if ever I heard it), rather than attacking a cardboard cut-out of ‘The Man’. This may all seem overly theorised and overly romantic, imagine though that we are sat in a studio together, with the sun going down over the Lake District, Chongqing, Berlin or Brazil, we would surely stand a better chance of walking away with something useful, more than from just reading this on the internet or a cheap print out. A lot of art has its own language or is antilanguage, and much of it cannot be communicated across the internet, no matter how fast your fibre optic BT broadband is. As long as residencies are about connecting people rather than connecting people with place then they will have a long and deserved future. The focus of artist residencies shouldn’t be on communicating what it means to be British or trying to experience what it means to be Chinese, German or Brazilian but about exchanging different perspectives on what it means to make art now, in this increasingly homogenised yet polarised global context, undertaking residencies, not as anthropologists, teachers or ambassadors but as artists.
The quote at the top of this essay is taken from ‘Des EspaceAutres’, published by the French journal Architecture-Mouvement-Continuité in October, 1984, it was the basis of a lecture given by Michel Foucault in March 1967. Translated from the French by Jay Miskowiec it can be found in, Des EspacesAutres.In N. Mirzoeff.ed. 2nd edition 2002.The Visual Culture Reader. London: Routledge. ‘The British Council brings more shame on us’ was an article written by Nick Cohen for The Observer, Sunday 15 April 2012 and can be found at http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/apr/15/nick-cohen-chinacensorship-writers?newsfeed=true ‘Ladders for development: Impact of Arts Council England funding cuts on practice-led organisations’, by Dany Louise, 2012 can be found at http://www.a-n.co.uk/research/article/1300054/1224267 Don Koberg and Jim Bagnall, The universal traveller: a soft-systems guide to creativity, problem-solving, and the process of reaching goals, Menlo Park, California Crisp Publications Inc 2003. To view ‘Filter Bubbles’ the TED-Talk given by Eli Pariser in 2011 visit http://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_bubbles.html For more information on Meme Theory see ‘The Selfish Gene’ by Richard Dawkins, Published by Oxford University Press 1976
Placing the Artist, Questioning the Value of Artist Residencies at Chinese Arts Centre 01.03.2012
Object no. 17/20 broken wheel and Object no. 8/20 pheasant wing, from The Objects of Residencies, these objects completed a residency in the studio of Shona Harrison on 29/02/2012 and are now residing elsewhere.
Living Room All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is arbitrary
Studio 7, 884 Art Space, Huang Jue Ping, Chongqing, China The studio smelt like my Granddad Derek. It was a trapezium. Shaped like the outline of my dad's chipped front tooth, the biting edge at a 70 degree angle where a football fan in Doncaster had smashed a bottle of Carlsberg into his face. The floor had a lunar, crater-filled, feel to it, a grey gym floor but splattered with white paint and scuffed and dented by dragged things. Ceiling like a pool hall, thick strip lights dangling around the place, there were also some gallery lights for a softer effect. White walls. The straight wall on the right had a door into a small living space and was made from stone blocks. It reminded me of 'A Vision of Utopia'. When I was 11, my dad took me to the Victoria Art fair in London, in a small gallery off the main drag, leant against the wall, I saw an 8 foot, cracked and dusty blank canvas, a small bronze disc screwed into the frame announced, 'A Vision of Utopia.' The studio was full of Art Director Wang's work, sketches and oil paintings of nude Chinese girls. I'd asked for the space to be completely empty and it was disappointing to find it haunted by the erotic ghosts of it's previous life. I used a porcelain tea pot to serve Yorkshire tea into round-bottomed Chinese tea cups. Water spilt out and scalded my hand. I pretended it didn't happen. Slight injuries that don't affect my life are pleasurable. Like ghost houses, tequila shots and icy showers. Me, Wang, his assistant Allen and the assistant they'd appointed to me, Kate, sat on the sofas. The paintings suggested the sofas had previously been occupied by flesh-modelling young ladies. Allen and Wang smiled tirelessly while Kate looked miserable, her thick sulking bottom lip made me want to kiss her and believe her, in the same way that it's easier to believe the honesty of a refusal. She had shoulder length hair that widened at the bottom to form a cone. A Japanese style and it contrasted with the cascading hair of Wang's women. If she had been a Western girl Kate would have been considered thin but she was curvier than most Chinese girls. I was determined to submerge myself in prostitution and suspected she could distract me. I wanted to pay to fuck Chongqing girls all over the studio space. I'd not mentioned this part of the project in my application for Art's Council funding.
Wang looked over at Kate, he furrowed his brow but kept his smile pinned in place, like a dead butterfly. 'Kate is just worried because the last artist in residence was also from England. There were some problems.' Kate remained motionless, Wang stroked his pony tail and then spoke to her in the Chongqing dialect, some words were Mandarin so I could catch their meaning and thus reconstruct my own version. I had learnt to treat my translations of dialectical Chinese like horoscopes or dreams, thus I only remembered the ones that came true. Wang seemed to be reassuring Kate that I would not be like the last artist and that she should make more of an effort. In Chinese I told them that it didn't matter. It was timed well, a hint of a frown flickered across Wang's face, a dash of smile over Kate's, as the two briefly imagined I could understand what they had said. Kate asked me about my project in Chinese, I didn't understand all the words she used but I understood the question. I replied in English. My answer was rehearsed. 'It's about place, about ideas of utopia.' 'Uto-pia' 'A perfect place. I've lived in London for 6 years and it feels stale.' The difference between exploring a project and explaining one is like the difference between loving someone and telling them you love them. If you could express your feelings and ideas through words alone then you wouldn't need to gently kiss their neck, paint, squeeze their hand one last time before leaving the house or create artwork at all. In both situations I've learnt to ramble on long enough while ignoring the language and that feeling of fraudulent silliness. I try to say so much that the emotions and some key words diffuse into the listeners head while leaving them with nothing tangible or quotable to hold against me. 'It's depressing, orderly, no room for chance, whereas Chongqing is like the city of cities, a forest of skyscrapers, snaking rivers, fairy-tale bridges, winding
paths, the city that London children would sit and draw if asked to imagine a huge futuristic, beast of a city. The city outside will charge my studio inside. I'll be living here, working here and putting on an exhibition here. I want to transform it into a living room gallery. Grow and cultivate it with local artists to try and capture a sense of Chongqing and live within this microcosm of Chongqing, my final exhibition will be my House Warming party. At the time when I can most understand the city, feel most at home and can work most effectively, my work will be over and I'll have to leave. Then I'll ship my room to the London Biennial, display it and live in it, bringing my London back to London.' Wang patted my shoulder. His face had twisted with concern but continued to drag that indefatigable smile along with it, like a sickly porpoise trapped in a trawling fishing net. 'This is not what you told me about in your mails.' 'It's the same idea only said differently.' The bastards were trying to catch me out on something, but before they had the chance my dick would be wet, their cunts would be gaping and juices would be flowing all over the place. They all started speaking in the Chongqing dialect. Smile-muscles still stretched, Wang caressed his tail and peered at me through his small glasses, glasses as small as those worn by my Granddad Derek. I kept trying to grasp at these memory-burps, ephemeral coincidences, but they were of course meaningless. If I'd had ideas for a project about Egypt then I would've found pyramids in the skyscrapers and unravelled mummies in the bathroom. This was the project because it was the thing stuck on my mind and now it was the thing stuck on my mind because it was the project. I'd only met my Granddad Derek a few times, he didn't agree with male pony tales. My granddad had always smelt smoky, been old, warm and had a whispery crackly voice, a man like a fireplace. He never owned a fireplace just a cheap electric heater. My dad hardly spoke to him. My mum said that when dad
was young, he and his brothers had been like a set of rabid wombles, scuttling and scrapping around, fags in mouth, stealing stuff. Granddad Derek spent the family money in pubs. My dad became a pub landlord. Every year my Granddad Derek used to take my dad down to an art fair in London. My granddad had a market stall in Castleford. They'd buy a few items, but most of the time my granddad visited prostitutes, while my dad wondered around London alone. The Mandarin words 'shenmeyisi' (what meaning) leapt out of the conversation from the smiling mouth of Allen, top lip shadowed by dashes of soft black fluff, the moustache of a young Chinese man. I remained quiet, I looked at an unfinished oil painting of a naked Chinese woman draped over a bed, the pubic area hadn't been painted in yet, she had a mannequin’s mound. I don't know which race or type of girl Granddad Derek preferred or how my dad ever found out about it. My granddad Derek died of throat cancer when I was 12. My Dad took me to London art fairs until my parents divorced when I was 14. He ran rough Yorkshire pubs filled with sketches and paintings, mostly of women, but they weren't as nude as Wang's. I'd been taken on a lot of Spanish beach-holidays as a kid, but London had been my first adventure. London had also broke-up my family. Now I can see it was for the best. The last time we came back from London, my mum had sensed something strange about my dad. He'd refused to fuck her, he'd feigned a groin injury. But then finally he surrendered and confessed to whoring. I would never confess. If you can lie to yourself then you never do anything wrong and don't feel guilty. If you can lie to everyone else then you never get caught. Honest men appear the least honest. I don't really know my dad as a man. I felt like London, art and whores were my inheritance, the only thing we shared. I wasn't sure what it meant. It was like he'd written me a letter in hieroglyphs. Chongqing, as a kind of vulgar exaggeration of my London, could perhaps be the place to find some kind of crude Rosetta Stone. In Chongqing I could translate it all into Chinese, Ancient Greek, Hebrew or Klingon and at least be that little bit closer to finding some overriding meaning.
I poured four more cups of tea, Allen and Wang were still discussing me and the alleged incongruities. I tried to explain to Kate some more of my ideas about the project. I had this urge to do it in a simpler less showy way, as if she could really understand me, I even touched on the connection to my dad and granddad, but it was like furiously taking bites out of a pork chop in the hope of showing someone the essence of the pig within.
Love House Estate Agents, Ma Jia Yan Road, Chongqing Kate had brought me there. She aimed her long lensed Nikon camera out of the glass doors. The doors ran from floor to ceiling, like those in a grand hotel lobby. 'What are you taking photos of? People?' 'No. Chairs.' In the centre of the room there was a large model city, apartment blocks jutted out of a forest canopy like princess imprisoning towers. On the walls was an LED lit map resembling a circuit board and artists impressions of Chongqing's future; the grey concrete had been retaken by a wave of green; Chongqing's murky rivers and skies had been dyed blue and the water had been dotted with jet skis leaping about like dancing dolphins. I enjoyed my complimentary green tea and listened to the estate agent musicians. One played the keyboard, another sang in French, their music went, rum-du-deedu rum-du-dee-dee-bu and they both wore black berets and French prisonstripes. To our left was a large poster with the words 'Chongqing Life' in both English and Chinese. It was a picture of white and brown people enjoying a European style square of coffee shops. I'd never heard of a place like it in Chongqing and although everyone was photoshopped into the image there were no Chinese. I pointed to a picture of a chair occupied by a skinny Indian woman with a fat white guy.
'Will you sit on this chair please, I want to put some Chinese into this poster.' Kate squatted in front of the Indian woman, onto the chair, into the picture and she took hold of the big man's glass of wine, leaning in to take a sip. 'I'd like my first event to be like this. I'll get some of the art students to design model houses. Make an estate agents.' 'Estate agent?' 'Like this place, a house shop.' 'You should visit one of the living rooms...show living rooms.' 'A show home! That'd be brilliant! How do you know about these places?' 'My work is about this too.' 'What is your work?' 'On the computer. I write articles too.' 'What are your articles about?' 'The government.' 'Be careful...you'll end up in prison' mock seriousness. 'No, I'm going to stop writing soon' seriousness. She moved over to the 'Chongqing Forest' poster and posed, arms wrapped around a huge tree trunk, a tartan boot raised and short skirt pushed up revealing a green-tights-covered thigh. Like an inquisitive woodland chipmunk, an estate agent popped out then ushered us over to some cardboard cut outs of recreated 60s-Communistpropaganda. The estate agent knew what we wanted before we even knew ourselves. We pushed our faces into the face slots, smiled, the first fullyformed smile I'd seen Kate make. We were giddy as we held our little red
books; proudly dressed in our khaki uniforms and jaunty red-star-pinned caps.
Plum Bar, Huang Jue Ping Road Kate squealed as a peanut sized cockroach cautiously wobbled over the picture of three big Western noses and three communally kissing tongues. The cockroach moved like a young child on a stabilised bicycle, rocking from side to side but steadily heading forward. Kate downed a small glass of brown beer. I looked her face up and down, she was gently lit by the table lamp, it was made from the roof-light of a taxi. That afternoon me and Xiao Min, a local artist, had finished building a monstrous lamp for my living room. It was made out of the pieces of broken cars that Xiao Min had spent a year collecting. Most of the parts were appropriated from the busy stretch of road in front of his apartment building. Looking at Kate my work seemed ridiculous and the idea of whoring seemed depressing. Was she fixing me, breaking me or was I still just a stupid boy, had I never changed? All the knowledge and experience that I'd believed I'd been collecting seemed worthless. I wanted to try and fuck all these feelings out of my head but she wouldn't let me. The shadowy Wang and Allen sat far from the taxi-lamp. Allen tutted at Kate. In English Wang said, 'You don't have to drink so fast.' In Mandarin she answered, 'talk or drink, old man.' Wang made a sound like a raggedy, low-on-power, laughing-doll playing with a litter of black puppies, then he looked down into his beer and stroked his pony tail. Kate downed another glass. 'They think I'm an alcoholic.' Allen turned his back to her and asked Wang something in the Chongqing dialect.
I leaned in close to where I suspected Kate's ear to be hiding, 'my stepfather is a real alcoholic. You're not an alcoholic but you do drink fast.' 'You're parents are divorced?' 'Yes, when I was 14. Yours?' 'No, but they should be, when I was 11 my father lived in Japan. We lived with my mother's boyfriend. I tried to kill myself.' Could 11 year-olds try and kill themselves? I didn't say anything. 'Drink or talk.' We both finished our glasses of beer.
GuangNeng Materials Warehouse Kate touched her knuckles to her nose, her palm covered her mouth. We both knew that untreated MDF was toxic but the hundreds of people sat drinking tea, playing cards, buying MDF, selling MDF, touting deliveries and loading trucks didn't seem to know or care. I chose my materials. Kate said Allen was her ex-boyfriend. A forklift truck lifted it's palette over my head as it turned to my right. I said I didn't like Allen. 'You don't know him, he's a good man.' 'Maybe, but you're special, there's something different about you. He's normal.' 'Yes, he's normal. Normal is safe. Wang Laoshi (teacher in Chinese) likes him, he's Wang Laoshi's best friend.' 'Allen is Wang's student.'
'Yes, I'm his student too. They both have the same dark way of looking at things. Allen is my best friend too.' 'No, he's not. Men and women can't really be friends.' 'Aren't we friends?' 'No, I could never be your real friend.' 'So do you think it's lovers or strangers?' 'No, now we're just friends but not real friends. I wouldn't let you and Allen sleep together at my house. I wouldn't like it, so that's not real friends. Would Allen let me and you sleep at his house?' 'No.' I was going to use the MDF to build a simple box. I planned to sit in the box every morning and write a short piece of automatic writing. I'd tape each piece to the inside walls. When the final living room was exhibited I'd invite visitors to crawl inside, read by candlelight and listen to sounds recorded from the streets of Chongqing. Beep-beep.Burrrgh.Ding-ding. Beep. Burrghburrgh.Buuuuuuuuuuurrrrrrrrrrrrrgggggggghhhhhh. I squeezed Kate's arm. 'You know my feelings about you, what do you think about me?' 'It doesn't matter.' 'It matters to me.' 'It doesn't matter because time will answer everything. You'll go back to London soon and I'll have to stay here and finish my studies with Wang Laoshi and Allen. I'm not just a stupid Chinese girl, you like me because all the other Chinese girls say you're handsome and tall and they love foreign artists, but I'm cold to you.'
'If I said I'd stay here because of you, when we haven't even kissed, you'd think I was crazy.' 'Yes.' 'But I have some money saved, I want to keep studying Chinese and I'm an artist. I can work here, I can work in London, I can work anywhere, it doesn't matter. If I wanted to stay longer I could.' She paid the delivery truck. 'I'm from here. I don't even want to stay here, but I have to wait until I finish my studies. You need to go back to London and finish your work, I wouldn't want you to stay here just because of me, later you'd be angry with me.' Our short and stocky driver was grinning at me and motioning excitedly with a flat-hand held high above his head, expressing his delight at my height. 'I do what I want. If I wanted to go I'd go, if I wanted to stay I'd stay. I'm an artist not a banker or office worker, I don't have to go back to London if I don't want to, but we haven't even kissed. Eat dinner with me again.' Kate and the driver got into the front of the truck. I wanted to ride in the back on top of my MDF but the driver said foreigners couldn't do that, the police would stop us. I took a taxi back by myself.
Snack Street Outside the men's bathroom there was a black and white photograph of the quirky old buildings that used to be here. They'd been knocked down and then rebuilt all over again, but with a Disney Land quality. Pretty faux wooden houses stacking up and back into the cliff face. I was the only white person there, Kai, a German artist, had told me he wouldn't go with me because it was a fake China. It certainly wasn't old China, or ugly China and each curve of each path had been designed on a computer. I didn't know
what I should morally feel about it all, so I decided to feel nothing and just eat and look and listen and piss and explore. I ate some fiery noodles next to a young couple who talked loudly in the Chongqing dialect and banged the table and jabbed each other, moving excitedly and animatedly like jerky Szechuanese shadow puppets on sticks. The girl gnawed spicy meat off a duck carcass, the boy ripped his way through a Subway sandwich. It was all so real that I felt silly when my phone vibrated and I quickly put down my chopsticks to check it. A small screen with black-blocky text. Text messages are to the lonely, as porn is to nymphos, as an espresso is to a coke-head. Kate cancelled dinner for the third night in a row. 'sorryican,t have dinner with you. i have woman issues.' I walked into Subway and stole their garbage, I had to pay a taxi driver 20RMB to start driving and ignore the angry Subway cleaner gesticulating and yelling after us. I went back to the studio and sculpted an angry duck out of Subway sandwich wrappers.
Hot Pot Restaurant Kate had ordered the saucer of pig's stomach and the semi-solid ducks' blood, I ordered strips of meat. Thin slices of beef and pork, to dip into our chilli packed broth. 'My friend died in a car crash, so I started drinking a lot, I was drunk everyday for one month. I met one friend from America, she helped me, she taught me how to read the bible.' 'I don't believe in God.' 'In China the government doesn't use people's money for the right things and nobody cares about other people, children get hit by cars but nobody stops, if they believed in God they could be good.' 'In every country governments waste and steal the people's money. Believing in God must be nice, I just can't believe in it. But I don't think everything would be wonderful if everyone believed in God. When people believe in God
it doesn't matter if their life is shit because they just imagine that when they're dead stuff will be better. When people believe in God they only do more good things because they're scared not to. Governments usually like God, God helps to keep everyone dumb and happy.' 'Maybe. I don't know if I believe in it or not, but it helped me. God is a nice thing.' 'God is a very pretty thing.' God was the last thing I needed to further complicate things with Kate, especially not that fundamental American one that dispatches bible quoting marines, movie stars and missionaries around the globe and into people's heads. She went to take my photo. I puffed out my cheeks. Click. She aimed again. I stuck out my tongue. Click. 'Let me take your photo properly.' 'No. I'll take a photo of me and you, if you want, I don't like pictures of me on my own.' I came round the table and took a picture of me kissing her cheek. After, she turned her face toward mine, 'Where shall we go now, you choose.' On the 'ch' of choose I felt her breath hit my lips. I imagined she understood the subtext of her words. Cheeks, obviously, don't count so we'd still not even kissed. Yet, even though I didn't really believe in morals anymore, I hadn't slept with any of the prostitutes. I wasn't just worried that the gate-guard would catch me and report back to Wang to Allen to Kate, I was enjoying smearing myself in this obsessive madness and I was working hard, making things. The city was heavy, dirty, ugly and amoral but that made me feel the opposite, lighter. It felt like the dead sea when I'd exhibited in Israel. I'd lain back into it even though it looked and felt like it was contaminated with clouds of semen. I'd
closed my eyes and floated around, imagining I was a jelly fish. Until an obese American child swam head first into my ribs. 'Kate, it's your city. I don't know anywhere to go, you choose.' 'OK, scissors, rock, paper, the loser can choose.' Her stone bent my scissors. 'Fine, I lose, but now you have to go where I say. Can I choose anywhere?' 'Anywhere. But it has to be somewhere healthy.' 'Really? I know something healthy we can do.' 'Nothing bad. Somewhere healthy and not bad.' 'My bad and your bad might be different. What you think is bad, I might think is very good.' I had a semi and although I did like this high school romance I hoped she'd just give me something to release a little bit of tension. The day before, I'd worked with a local artist called Ye Huo, used oil, canvas and acrylics to create strips of meat. We'd hung them around the living room. Some of mine had vagina type shapes swirled into them, I'd painted them furiously, alternating between looking at Ye Huo's butcher-snapped photos and imagining Kate. 'OK, I'll choose then. Starbucks?'
Street BBQ Stall Me, two German artists, two French artists and a video artist from London sat on the street eating kebabs and aubergine. We drank 3.1% Shanchong beer from thin plastic cups. I was on a Western style toilet, lid down. I'd rescued it from a rubbish heap outside the exhibition we'd just been to see.
Vincent and Paul, the two French guys, had exhibited a model of Chongqing's skyscraper city, they'd made it from rat poison and rat traps. Apparently, on the second day of making it, they'd discovered suicidal rat bandits had snook in during the night and demolished half of Chaotianmen harbour. No bodies were found. I shuddered as a scavenging miniature poodle brushed past my leg, giant rats. The floor was carpeted with empty cardboard tubs, bamboo chopsticks, wooden skewers and was being simultaneously cleaned up by hungry pet dogs, a motley crew of Pekinese, Chihuahuas and Dachshunds. My toilet seemed fitting. Vincent kicked it, 'What will you make with that?' 'I won't make anything with it. It's good as it is. Everybody knows that the useful is useful, but nobody knows the useless is useful too. A Chinese guy said that.' 'It's been done before.' 'Yes, but...' Allen marched over. My sentence collapsed, he waved a plastic bottle of sweet green tea near my face and in English said, 'My friend, you've done a very bad thing.' He didn't give me time to answer or react. It was all surreally beautiful. I imagined projecting a threatening bottle of iced-tea onto the walls of my living room, while 'my friend, you've done a very bad thing' played on loop. Allen went off the way he came on. Like a defeated soldier, shuffly. Body slumped but steady and head still held high. As he reached the fried potato stall he must have been able to hear the eruption of European laughter, poor bastard, but he didn't turn around to look. He was brave and I was surprised he could speak English. I both pitied him and at the same time could vividly imagine holding his face down and drowning him in the frying potatoes. But unlike me he had actually been inside Kate.
The artists all looked at me, waiting for some debauched tale. 'The worst thing about all that is...I haven't even done anything bad, I've tried, I want to, I'll keep trying, but I've done nothing.' After they had all set off back to their gated community, which was next door to the university, I stayed on my toilet and had a smoke. The packet had a panda on it. I'd quit 5 years ago but cigarettes are so cheap in China and everyone I had met was a smoker, including Kate. It also gave me something to concentrate on when the communal staring-at-the-giant-white-guy, and the lonesome, paranoid feelings started to affect the shape of my walk. I picked up the toilet, arms straight-out in front, hugging it into my chest. Heavy. My phone started to ring. I hoped it was Kate. I dropped the toilet in a rush to answer. Kaaaang. Loud but drowned out by the noise of a chugging, hornblaring lorry. Buuuuuuuuuuurrrrrrrrrrrrrgggggggghhhhhh. Some people and dogs briefly stopped eating and glanced over at me. Kate said Allen was actually still her boyfriend. He'd seen the cheek kissing on her camera. He told her he wanted to cut me with a knife. The toilet was cracked. The crack went as far up as the seat, it branched into three near the bottom and looked like the twiggy arm of a snowman trying to drag itself out of the bowl. Every December my mum would remind me about my childhood christmasphobia. It had lasted until I was seven. I told Kate that none of it mattered. Nothing had changed.
Living Room Walking into the living room you hit a battered, fire damaged bookshelf, the back kicked out, you could see through it like a piece of classical Chinese furniture. Tatty Chinese novels, litter and playdough sculptures were spread out across the shelves. Twinkling fairy lights wound through it all. Chongqing lit up at night.
Besides the bookshelf, the lamp, the box, the duck, the meat and the toilet there was a giant doily-shaped rug and four paintings of cityscapes; a blurry dystopia, a utopia populated by mosquito men, a minimalist cream and yellow back alley and a painting of a garage door. I'd also built a sofa with Kate. It had a skeleton made of benches and wooden canvas-frames, was softened by cushions and cheap bed sheets and covered in papier-mâchÊ. We'd used black and white A4 sized photocopies of photos that Kate had taken around the city, dipped them in wall paper paste and plastered them all over the frame. Everyone else had gone home. Me and Kate sat on the sofa. I pulled her into me, trying to get her to cuddle me, she didn't fight but she didn't melt the way I'd hoped. She pretended to fall asleep and I lay there, eyes open. I squeezed her hand, she didn't squeeze back but she pretended to wake up. I moved in to kiss her. She kissed me back. Her tongue and lips as responsive as mine, but then she pulled away. 'I need to take a taxi home.' 'But I'm leaving tomorrow night. Stay.' 'I know you care about me. I care about you too. You're a good man, but you are the kind of person who can just abandon people. I'm not saying you're bad but you can just abandon people.' 'I can stay longer.' 'You can't. You need to go.' 'It's good. It's good to test things with time and distance.' 'I can't get used to it. I don't want to make friends with any more foreigners, they just leave. It's difficult.' 'Yes, people leave, but it's not difficult, it's easy. If you really want to stay in touch with someone then you do and then you meet again. If it's too difficult then it wasn't right anyway, so it's good that they've gone, so that you have
room in your life to meet someone better. I've met so many people that I've really liked and then never seen again but then a few, you do actually end up seeing again and then they end up becoming your best friends. Stay.' 'I can't stay.' 'I didn't think I could feel like this for anyone anymore. We don't have to do anything at all. Just stay on this sofa and sleep.' 'I've got an English class at eight tomorrow. I can't miss it. The university has given me a warning letter, I've already missed too many classes.' 'Stay.' She took a taxi home.
Living Room She looked short without her heels. She was wearing a lacy black bra and pants set. If she had been a Western girl then she would have been considered thin but she was curvier than most Chinese girls. My friend Tom, a gallery technician, had given me her agent's number. Real Chinese Girls. We only spoke in Chinese. She didn't seem to be able to speak English. She said she was 23. I asked her how long she'd been living in London, 1 year. I asked her how long she'd being doing this job, 10 years. I felt sad, I felt like I could and should help her. I felt that if I was nice to her and gentle then surely it was better than a normal assignment. I fucked her. She seemed more comfortable when I was pressed deep inside of her then when she had to talk to me. We'd fucked on the doily rug, lit up by the monstrous car lamp, she'd made all the right sounds. She could squeeze her vaginal muscles extremely tight, I imagined she could shoot golf balls. She asked me if it felt good. 'Yes, yes, very good, very good.'
She'd just had a quick wash in the adjoining bathroom, part of Ice Gallery, and was stood opposite me, looking so tiny. 'Come sit on the sofa with me.' 'I'm tired, I want to go home now.' 'No, stay. Come sit on the sofa with me, we can sleep here for a bit.' 'Please, I've been working all day, I'm so tired. I want to go home.' 'Stay... fine, you can go home but you need to give me some of the money back.' 'OK stupid egg. You are a stupid egg. I'll stay on your sofa with you. Stupid paper sofa. Stupid egg.' I tried to kiss her, she lightly slapped my chin and said that my stubble tickled. 'Please, kiss me.' 'Why? You're not my husband, why should I kiss you?' 'Look, I said I wanted a girl who would kiss me.' I didn't try to kiss her again. This had been rape. But I still didn't let her go home and I still imagined I could help her and maybe she could enjoy it. I just needed one night of love and then I'd be ready to bend life over a barrel and fuck it all. I started to repeat the intro to Roy Orbison’s song 'Oh Pretty Woman' in my head, I couldn't remember anything past the line 'Oh pretty woman walking down the street.' My friend you've done a very bad thing. It was the last night of my exhibition in London. Even my dad and his wife had visited. Without any coaxing my dad had crawled into the box. He said he didn't understand everything I'd done but he was proud of me. London felt interesting and new again, but it didn't feel like home anymore, it felt as foreign as Chongqing. I no longer had a home, it wasn't
that I felt some deep spiritual connection with China or Asia, it was just that I felt as out of place in the UK as I did anywhere else. Since I'd gotten back Kate had only been in touch once, she'd emailed me a photograph of a painting she'd done of a garage door. There was no message with it. I'd applied for funding for a project in Brazil. I wanted to go to Rio. I wanted to cover my body and some whores' bodies in paint and then fuck them all over canvases. I planned to sell the paintings for as much money as possible. Become an art whore. I'd never been to Brazil before, I'd never had enough of my own money to breathe and really think before and I'd never unreservedly prostituted myself before. I had a strong urge to fuck everything and be fucked by everything. Though I hadn't mentioned any of this in my application for Arts Council funding. I pulled the Chinese prostitute into me, trying to get her to cuddle me, she didn't fight but she didn't melt the way I'd hoped. She pretended to fall asleep and I lay there with my eyes open until morning. She took a taxi home.
The Foreigner’s House, House Warming Party
For more images and information about The Foreigners House, please visit http://theforeignershouse.wordpress.com/
I would like to thank all the artists and members of the public who were involved with The Foreigners House with special thanks to YanYan, Jane, WangZiyun, Theresia Peng and all the students at the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute. I would also like to thank Shona Harrison, Mike Chavez-Dawson, Michael Barnes-Wynters (aka Barney), Dr Steven Gartside, Ian Hunter, Elizabeth Wewiora, Chinese Arts Centre and Arts Council England for all their help and Support.