TIM HEAD
Review for Contemporary Visual Arts no 15 1997
“Blue Skies” – installation in Chatham Dockyard
http://www.timhead.net/
A building which is vast for functional reasons can become a cathedral when you remove the function. Aspects which might have been quite ordinary to the creators, or merely practical choices become, in the eyes of people of a later time and culture, attributes of beauty. No3 Covered Slip in Chatham Dockyard is vast, built in the early 19th century. You look up at a roof reminiscent of an inverted wooden ship, a stunning rhythm of wood and glass. The man on duty when I went there was a retired dock worker. “It’s all triangles, I know that,” he said “The strongest shape.” In the early 20th century, with the building no longer needed as a slip, the floor was filled in and a mezzanine was added; the building was used for storing boats.
Chatham has turned to the heritage business: they want the public to come in droves to see the Sail Loft, the Ropery and so on. You stand on vast cleared spaces to gaze on this building or that; you know sites of teeming activity lie buried under your feet, along with thousands of jobs. That said, it’s a beautiful location, and one for which plans exist of a similar scale to the buildings: for a British Biennale, no less. Which at least is about “now” rather than history.
Tim Head’s piece BLUE SKIES was to be found on the mezzanine deck of No 3 Covered Slip. The deck is split into two halves by a wide slot running for most of its length. Against the far wall, two black silhouettes turn slowly in opposite directions: cows even. Their heads straight, their udders not sagging - these are neat ideograms of cows. The building is so huge, that even at five or six metres across, they don’t look all that big. Between the cows and us are two fields of flowers. Again, they are pristine: black centres, white petals, all identical, and supported so they seem to float off the floor - there must be two hundred of them. A thin white cord marks a line between the art and the audience: we cannot enter.
Head says his piece is a “virtual landscape” and the delightful surprise works - i.e. finding the components of landscape inside a building. But he wants the “seemingly weightless appearance” to “suggest a digitalised computer screen simulation”. His aim is to set up a contrast between this and the solidity of the building. This makes insufficient allowance for our curiosity: we peer at the far end and look at the scaffolding supporting the cows and motors, we want to ponder the methods; perhaps we wonder why it’s set up so we can’t go in amongst the flowers? In other words, the language of “construction” cannot be so easily escaped in such a place as this.
The adjoining building houses a collection of lifeboats; a sound tape of seagulls and hurricane-force winds and storms etc etc is booming away - and so inescapably laid over Tim Head’s piece. Of course, the very challenge of site-specific work is to cope with the extraneous factors (fire and safety regulations for example), and it’s a high-risk activity because of that. There’s also the whole question of matching the artist to the site. Here the idea was to achieve success by contrast - to set up a satisfying opposition between the building and its resonances and Head’s work and those resonances. An alternative strategy is to find an artist whose work is more in some sort of harmony or empathy already and start from there. This is perhaps a better route: though not as an easy option, mere embellishment would be boring. It’s more a case of sharing vocabulary - a building can be surprisingly loquacious.