This show is called 'Totem Motif' and all the work deals directly with monuments or notions of 'public art'? Yes, this show is made up of three different works - I'll describe each of them to you.
This show is called “Totem Motif” and all the work deals
directly with monuments or notions of ‘public art’?
Yes, this show is made up of three different works - I’ll
describe each of them to you.
“Study of Blackpool Tower”: I did this in December last year.
I’d gone to Blackpool to interview the band Sleaford Mods
for Arena Homme+, a magazine I write for occasionally. The
band were playing a short tour of the North of England and
Scotland, and I became very fixated on seeing them in Black-
pool. It made perfect sense to me: Sleaford Mods make songs
about the minimum wage, cultural disappointment and ‘social
entrapment’. Blackpool is officially Britain’s second poorest
town, it’s a completely broken, downtrodden and rough place,
but also a very famous seaside town, a place that was essen-
tially invented by Victorian industrialists for the workers from
Lancashire’s cotton mills to go on holiday for one week each
year and, well, go mad. It was, and still is, a sort of ‘safety
valve’ for the working classes, a place where people can go to
behave very badly ... get drunk, fight, fuck each other. It’s an
incredible place, but also deeply sad - and I was attracted to
this dichotomy. I went up there the day before the band were
due to play - I wanted to photograph the semi-derelict streets,
the neon, the drunks and the sad-fun. Unfortunately, all the
photographs I took were terrible, sub-Martin Parr clichés of
Northern working class misery ... my photographs looked
like Morrissey’s holiday snaps. But as I flicked back through
the images, wondering what to do, I noticed that almost all
my pictures had Blackpool Tower in the background ... and I
realised that this was the whole point. The Tower is virtually
inescapable, no matter where you stand in the town, no matter
how rotten the street is that you’re on; you are almost always
confronted by this majestic and beautiful mini-Eiffel Tower.
It struck me that Blackpool Tower (built in the 1890s) was
perhaps an early example of a monument being ‘deployed’ in
the same way that the British government now commission the
likes of Anish Kapoor and Antony Gormley to build enorm-
ous public sculptures in poor or post-industrial areas. That is:
they erect these enormous ‘tourist attractions’ like Temenos in
Middlesbrough or Angel of the North in Gateshead as ‘spec-
tacular symbols of positivity’ in the hope of regenerating these
areas that were wilfully rundown under the Thatcher govern-
ment of the 1980s. So, the Tower became my focus. I decided
to walk around Blackpool and photograph the Tower at every
point that it became visible within a half-mile half-circle, the
Tower always the same size and in the same position in every
shot. I had a few things in mind: John Baldessari’s Aligning:
Balls (1972), the Situationist ideas of ‘dérive’ and ‘psychogeo-
graphy’ and Victor Burgin’s UK76 (1976) ... but ultimately, I
felt that I’d found a way to objectively photograph the misery
of Blackpool without having to focus on it or seek it out ... the
framing of the Tower always dictating the content of each im-
age. So, the framing of the Tower has this duality: it is at once
a study of this majestic tourist attraction, this arguably cynical
deployment of a super-structure, but also a way to objectively
photograph the sadness that surrounds it.
“Anish and Antony Take Afghanistan”: This work stems
from an idea that I had to make ‘sculptural transplants’ of
public artworks by Antony Gormley and Anish Kapoor to
Afghanistan. The idea was a fantasy - I imagined myself being
the head of a United Nations-commissioned ‘think-tank’ that
would donate existing public artworks from the UK to
Afghanistan. The idea being that if the work of these two
sculptors can be used to ‘regenerate’ poor areas like Gateshead,
Middlesbrough, Stratford et al, then surely it might help to re-
generate a poverty-stricken, war-torn and economically broken
country like Afghanistan. So, I had someone make me images
of huge public sculptures ‘transplanted’ into the vast planes of
Helmand Province; but it didn’t really work, it just looked too
trite, too easy and flippant. This lead to me think more about
the scenario of Anish and Antony being deployed by the UN to
‘save’ Afghanistan than the actual images of what they might
do there. So I invented this story, I imagined what might go
on behind the scenes and I thought that this could only really
work as a sort of graphic novel or cartoon.
I was very lucky to then work with an artist called Will Henry
- he took my sketches and words and turned them in to these
great images ... this very concise fantasy that is probably
nearer to reality than we’d like to imagine.
“A Balloon for Spandau”: This is part of an on-going series
of works that began with A Balloon for Britain (2012). In A
Balloon for Britain, I imagined myself (again) to be a gov-
ernment employed ‘think-tank’. I imagined that the current
Conservative government had offered me millions of pounds
to devise a scheme that would regenerate Britain’s 10 poorest
towns and cities. Now, obviously, the government are happy
to pay my think-tank several million pounds to come up with
a spectacular and highly visible ‘solution’ which demonstrates
that they care about these depressed and failing communities,
but they don’t really want to spend billions on building a new
infrastructure that involves creating manufacturing indus-
tries, hospitals, schools or social housing. Essentially, they
just want to ‘cheer up’ these places - they don’t want to deal
with the real problems, but they want to be seen to be doing
‘something’. With this as my brief, I came up with the idea
of floating gigantic (50 metre tall) party balloons across each
of these 10 poverty stricken cities ... and of course my idea
was a hit. The government got lots of positive press, and the
people enjoyed having enormous party balloons float over their
towns. My concept was so successful that I have since been
employed to create A Balloon For America (2013) - floating
balloons over the 10 poorest cities in the USA and A Balloon
For Sélestat (2013) - 10 balloons floated over a small and quite
nondescript town in France. So, having visited Spandau and
realising it was not so much poor as just a bit dull, I decided to
propose floating a balloon over the area near the train station
in the hope that I might bring both joy and ambition to the
people who live and work there. Early market research shows
that of the 100 people asked to express a ‘pro’ or ‘anti’ balloon
opinion, 67 people said they welcomed the idea, 29 thought it
was potentially hazardous to both motorists and aircraft and 4
people said they did not care either way.
Finally, there is one more work - Totem Motif - from which the
show takes its title. This is a ‘found’ photograph from 1964. It
shows two young women admiring a recently erected Henry
Moore public sculpture in the ‘new town’ of Harlow, Essex.
Moore, like his progeny Kapoor and Gormley, was a master of
the banal public artwork.
Scott King was born in Goole, East Yorkshire, England, 1969.
He lives and works in London. In the 1990s he worked as
Art Director of i-D magazine and later as Creative Director
of Sleazenation magazine. As a graphic designer he has
collaborated with such iconic figures as Malcolm McLaren,
the Pet Shop Boys, Michael Clark and Suicide. King’s work
has been exhibited worldwide at such institutions as the
Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary
Art, Chicago; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; The State Hermitage
Museum, St. Petersburg; the Institute of Contemporary Arts
and the Barbican, London.
On 10 and 11 July 2014, Scott King will curate ‘The Festival
of Stuff’ at Haus der Berliner Festpiele, Berlin.
Scott King is represented by Herald St, London and Bortolami,
New York.
Opening on May 16, 19 - 21 h
Between Bridges
Keithstrasse 15 - 10787 Berlin
Wednesday to Saturday 12 - 18 h