Down in London town, stretched out under a bend in The Thames, lies a stack of concrete rectangles, lines, circles and elevations. Set against the dirty white of the clouds and the brownish-blue waters of the river, the grey tangle rises into a sprawl of low-rise buildings. One of these stubby buildings is the immense Hayward Gallery.
Just like the jumble of disconnected shapes outside, the rooms and the corridors of The Hayward run together in a way that make no sense. Yet, somehow, they also fall in perfect order. Angles form and shift in front of you as you walk along. You never quite know if you are walking into or out of a room. At times, sunlight pours in from random cutouts above your head. At other times, dark corners draw you in like you're locked down under the earth in a fall-out shelter.
Most of the structure was formed by concrete poured into giant, wooden molds. Once the concrete set and dried they pulled away the timber and left walls lined with markings from the panels. Crafted into all sorts of shapes and directions, these frames went up and around until they all added up into the flowing set of concrete bliss.
The effect is a hypnotic, swirling patina of wood grain, ordered by the straight creases left behind by the cracks in the panels. I wish I am able walk you around there one day. It's not just the beauty of the patterns or the organisation of the shapes or even the weight of all that concrete that would captivate you - it's the work.
To see those markings is to see all the work that those builders and craftsmen and architects and project managers put in. You would see the sweat and the imagination in the lines left behind by molds that were designed, constructed and discarded long before either of us were born.
I like it when you can see the work of those that made all of us possible. I like being shown how much work it took to get us both here. If for no other reason, just to remind you of how much you owe.
I saw a show of Ed Ruscha's paintings there. It was such a great show and I kept coming back to it. They tried to cover the full span his career. There were highlights from all the various tangents and themes he broke out on over the years. Ruscha's work - the paintings anyways - are a riff on the shapes made by words and letters. The way the curves and the lines and the heights appear and how they interact with each other.
A pretentious viewer may say his paintings are a "mediation on typography". But, the word 'meditation' is thrown around too much these days. Silence and focus doesn't just come from an app put out by a TV guru. And sometimes clarity and precision comes from noise and distraction.
A decade or so later, I went to another great Ruscha show. This one was in Austin. He had recently donated his archive to the University of Texas and they were keen to show off. This show was mainly filled with journals of his ideas and photographs re-printed from his artist's books. The gallery space was quite small and they packed too much onto their short collection of walls. It all felt a little too eager and loud. You really had to focus in and block out all the noise to find the silence in that show.
But this isn't something that bothered me. I don't mind about that. As much as I want to see your work, I'm also happy to put in some of my own - especially, if you have already put in the work.
Because I can definitely meet you in the middle if you set out first. And I can also meet you there, if I set out first. But I'm getting too old and tired to keep turning up in the middle to find nothing there but broken molds and empty gas stations.
