The Garden Centre Plinth: a modest

proposal for the dismantling of art and

architecture

Portal

There are three parts to this – but twice over.

The first of the triptychs concerns dying. The
second spreads things more thinly. So, the
second part first, then.

Place, things, trajectories.

The place I am going to write about here is

utterly bereft and abject, and yet it is a portal
for a city that regularly comes top of polls
and indicator-registers for the city with the
best “quality of life” in its country.

Approached from the city’s main railway

station, it is an alleyway over which has been
erected a flimsy two-dimensional arch
advertising walking times (close to those of a
snail) to the University and the City Centre.
In fact, this city has no centre.

To one side of the

arch is a street sign:
ST CLEMENTS LANE
– to one end of this
sign has been pasted
the graphic of a
skull, to the other a
cartoon face, goofy and toothy. The bone
beneath the fun; one in dialogue with the
other.

This is almost certainly a very old route. The

chapel after which it is named is long sunk
into the flood plain. It connects exactly to
Howell Road (named after the leader of the
Celts ethnically cleansed from the city by
‘Saint’ Athelstan in the tenth century) which
then snakes half a mile to the city’s High
Street. Somewhere along the steep lane are
buried two victims of the city’s notorious
theatre fire – the worst in its nation’s history.
The Alley Today

Today the lane is a transitory place – there is

occasionally some dealing in the sub-alley
towards the bottom, more often the low
walls serve as perches for hard drinkers,
squeezing their bottles and scowling
grumpily at the snaking files of office
workers, yawning students and perky
teenage day trippers.

The one thing that distinguishes this space is

an odd residence built around its halfway
mark about seven years ago. Trumpeted as a
‘space age’ (you already know it is an
anachronism) icon for new arrivals to the
city, to define the city’s newfound modernity,
nobody would buy it and it has defaulted to
student accommodation. Its fringe is now
always generously larded with rubbish –
bottles, papers, timetables, wrappers.
But almost a year ago now,
a different kind of deposit
appeared on the lane:
three pieces of a garden
sculpture, a robed figure
cast in yellowy grey. The
pieces did not add up to
the whole artwork, but
strewn about the very
bottom of the lane they at
least suggested the collapse of something
imagined. A glance and a tentative toeing
revealed cheap neo-classical Garden Centre
tat.

When I first came across

the debris, I trod around it.
The next time I
photographed it. There
was something ‘aesthetic’
about the relation of the
different pieces; each time
I passed they had moved
into a new composition.
 Most striking was the base
part – a sweep of garment
abruptly truncated on a
shallow plinth. This was
the first piece to
disappear.

“Camelot in smithereens”

Every time I walked down

or up the lane – say, four
times a week – I took a photograph of the
positions of the remaining two pieces.
Nothing particularly dramatic happened with
or around them – the pieces moved a few
yards up the lane and onto a piece of grass,
and then rolled
about on it, lay
encrusted in
frost once, later
in snow, and
then were
reduced by one
as the head of
the statue (a face peeping over a mask, both
knowing and childlike) vanished, about two
months after the three pieces had first
appeared.

The ‘final’ piece then persisted for almost a

further half a year, working its way up and
over the small grassy verge and down into a
gutter, where it gathered various piece of
litter: plastic bottles, gas bills and leaves.
Each time I passed by I would photograph it,
despite the monotony of its predicament. The
one time I failed, it was a dark morning,
torrential rain was hurling itself down and a
small flood had partly
covered the cheap stone.

Two large dogs were

patrolling the stone and
marking it with their piss;
their territoriality dissuaded
me from using the flash.

The ‘final’ piece then moved

into the dealers’ alley, and settled into a
shallow gulley for the duration. By now the
summer had come and plants grew tall
around the remaining piece of the sculpture.
I realised I had never thought much about
what it had been when whole. Never thought
about that at all, in fact. I was only ever
interested in it in pieces. And yet, without
visualising it as a material whole, I had
always had an idea of it, had always carried
that around – of its modesty, of its
uncomfortable playfulness, of its sinister
reticence. These were like pocketable
Platonic ideals.
Purpose

A month and a half ago that final piece

moved back to the grass. I often wondered
what moved the pieces – foxes, dogs, the
drunks, the dealers? And to
what purpose?

Piles of rubbish sprang up

around the piece and then
it disappeared. For a while
I assumed that it was
buried in the rubbish, but
my digging revealed no
stone. I accepted that it had
gone for good. The rubbish was removed,
and the stone did not, and has not, returned.
My year-long ‘entertainment’ was over.
About a week later a
fourth piece of the
sculpture appeared
on the grass. Where
did it come from?
Had someone been saving it up for just this
eventuality? Had I thought it into being? The
‘accidental’ patterns of movement and
arrangement were perhaps not as accidental
as I thought. A pronoid dreamer was
dreaming up treats for me. Since then the
fourth piece has largely aped the behaviour
of the third and is at present becalmed
among the flowerless stalks in the gulley in
dealers’ alley.

Public Art

As well as a lesson in the free entertainment

available in the city - this dance performance
has run and run and is running still, with
self-contained episodes, running gags and
changes of cast – it now strikes me,
pronoiacally, that there is a possible
architectural practice, or an approach to
public art, here.

Project: the construction of giant sculptural

works or decorative buildings, erected in
easily disassembled pieces. The pieces would
 be large enough not to
be blown away, small
enough to be stolen or
carried off, ‘wittily’
repositioned, or
cleared by sanitation
workers. The work
would originally be
placed in a single site,
but would spread out
across the city, its
different parts
evoking both the
absence of its whole and the circulation of its
‘idea’. Areas that were never favoured with
iconic buildings or public art would
accumulate them as they wished. A kind of
dispersive art would see the practice
extended to existing buildings, as iconic,
signature constructions buildings were
slowly pulled apart, smuggled home,
trafficked into the suburbs, and spread,
democratically, across the face of the city.
O, and the first thing – about dying: you die
three times. First when your body ceases to
function, then when they bury you, and,
finally, on the occasion that your name is
mentioned for the last time.