As soon as the theme came to mind, so did three artists whose work I’ve seen recently and who seemed to fit the bill: individuals who have been boldly and ironically going where no artist has gone before.
It’s the end of February, 2002. I email them to find out where in the world they are at the moment, what it is they’re working on now, and how they understand what it is they’ve been doing over the last few years while living out of a suitcase. ‘Which came first, the work or the travel?’ I ask, just to get the ball rolling.
Shimabuku is the first to reply from his base in Yokohama,
Japan, though in recent years he has been to North and South America, Europe
and Australia. For him travel comes first: he’s looking for an experience of
things he doesn’t know, even though everyone else might be completely
familiar with it. This reminds me of the humility – and the sophisticated
take on relativity – he showed when we met in the summer of 2000 while he
was engaged on Cucumber Journey.
For that project, Shimabuku travelled up the Grand Union Canal from the
Chisenhale Gallery in east London to the Ikon Gallery, Birmingham. A
two-week voyage on a canal boat that would have taken him a couple of hours
by train: a slow journey for these fast times. I joined him for a ten-mile
stretch, and the morning passed at two very different paces: a contemplative
glide between locks, then a blur of windlasses as we opened and closed the
heavy lock gates. Shima was helped by four crew members that day, including
his travelling companion Rika Noguchi, but it was still hard work. At lunch
I asked Shima what he was going to exhibit when he got to Birmingham. Well,
he wasn’t sure. But he was hearing and seeing all manner of things along the
way; he was accumulating perspectives that were extraordinary, at least for
him; and he was slowly but surely pickling vegeta-bles. So he wasn’t too
worried about what he would have to show at journey’s end.
For me it was a great day out, so I was delighted to bump into Shimabuku a year later at the Hayward Gallery’s Facts of Life, an overview of contemporary Japanese art. The exhibition was a cold affair, most of the artists showing a distinct lack of interest in human relations. But Shimabuku lit up the show with a video of the day he collected an octopus from a Japanese fishing vessel, and gave the creature a tour of Tokyo, involving locals (and laughs) en route. In the process he gives Western viewers a fascinating glimpse of the city and its inhabitants. What struck me was how self-confidently the artist went about his own country, a confidence surely born from having single-mindedly travelled the world. Like the time he took the idea of a giant mermaid from his own country, and travelled with it to Sydney and Marseille. There he encouraged the people in these very different cultures to respond to the Japanese myth and to come up with a truly international myth, accessible to everyone and no one.
His most recent project, Seafaring Japan, is a poster
campaign, the object being to inform his countrymen of the four countries
(Korea, China, Taiwan and Russia) that can most easily be visited from Japan
by sea. So, for the moment, Shimabuku seems content to use his travel
experience to promote movement in others. Though, having said that, he has
just come back from Beijing, and has plans to visit Korea and Vietnam.
I’m still sitting in my London flat, dreaming about foreign lands, when Per
Hüttner replies to my email. He is in LA, and plans to reply in full when he
is on the plane returning to Europe. But, in fact, he’s back at his
Stockholm base before he gets round to it: ‘Travelling for me is a way to
understand myself and my Swedishness. When I am abroad, being Swedish gives
me a sense of security, while here it makes me cringe and gives me a strong
feeling of alienation.’
To try and appreciate this, I consider what I know of Hüttner’s work. Recent examples of his trademark jogging series of photographs feature him – dressed in sports wear – running through commercial districts of non-Western cities. So far he’s been to India, Mexico, Jordan and Zambia. In each place he normally runs an hour in the morning each day for a week, avoiding parks and other places where you might normally find joggers. He then returns later in the day and the week, with camera, to be photographed (usually by a local artist). The images are therefore representations of performances rather than documentation.
On my iMac I study the exotic panoramas he’s sent as attachments. There is something exhilarating about the blond dreadlocked figure near the centre of the mostly sunlit scenes, and when Hüttner talks about the experience of making the work, a similar sense of excitement is conveyed: ‘The first day I went running in Chennai (ex-Madras) was totally crazy: people screamed. But by day four nobody took any notice beyond an occasional "good morning, boss". In Mexico City people were loud and slightly hostile. My poor knowledge of Spanish prevented me from understanding what they said. In Amman, people were stunned by my jogging. Being big is still a sign of prosperity there. Those who can afford it take cabs even if they are just going a block or two. In Zambia a lot of people run to and from work or school. Often young men would run up and ask "Can I join you, Sir?" and we would run together, chatting about this and that.’
In telling contrast, Hüttner is working on a series called A Vulgar Display of Emotion. In photographs taken in various European cities and New York, Hüttner is shown, still in his all-white clothing, down on his knees in the city streets, visibly upset and shoeless, as hordes of passers-by cast furtive glances in his direction without breaking stride. This abject theme is taken further in a photograph in which Hüttner lies in the foetal position in a deserted market place in Marseille. He lies surrounded by discarded packaging, his still shining white clothes affording him none of the protection from harsh materialist reality that they seem to do when he’s in a typical non-Western urban setting.
But, to be honest, I’m not too worried about him, first because he seems to be in admirable control of his emotions and his art, but also because his vulgar display of physical fitness isn’t finished yet. He plans to go for runs in China this summer. Maybe he should sail from there to Japan, where I’m sure Shimabuku would gladly give the Swede a tour of Yokohama, and just as happily take a photograph of Hüttner at the end of a week spent either jogging or talking about notions of ‘home’ and ‘abroad’.
When Zoë Walker replies to my email, she explains that she’s been filming in Lincoln-shire and at Loch Lomond, and so has been away from her computer for a while. She tells me she feels like a long-distance lorry driver, so frequent has been her recent journeying up and down the country. But now – staying in a cottage on the border between England and Scotland, with its views of Holy Island, while doing the Berwick Gymnasium fellowship – she has a chance to reply to my questions about her itinerant existence over the last few years, and how it’s shaped her work.
When she was in London completing an MA at Goldsmiths, she made Portable Paradise. This is a transparent plastic dome, containing a desert island complete with artificial palm tree. It’s a flexible paradise too, having been used by Walker as a tent-sized snowstorm, a place for fooling around with a beach ball, and for blowing bubbles. Its creation says a lot about how alienated she felt while living in the big city. So it makes sense that, a year or so later, she got herself a residency on the island of Orkney. On that lovely flat island she was inspired to make Dream Cloud. In the video, Walker, wearing a yellow jumpsuit, has a cloud-like parachute attached to her back by strings. She strives to leave the land and join the puffy white clouds flying effortlessly in the blue sky… and comes tantalisingly close to achieving lift-off. So having found her fantasy island she wanted to escape from it?
Well, why not use fabulous place A as a means to get to
out-of-this-world place B?
In 2000, she made an inflatable tent-cum-mountain, attached it to a dinghy,
and floated up the Thames. The videoed performance, My Island Home, was part
of the An Ideal Home show at the V&A. The image of Zoë paddling in slow
motion in the early morning light, accompanied by symbols of her rural home
and a soundtrack of haunting music, creates a melancholic atmosphere. Like
the earlier jumping exercise, this is a complicated –
idealistic-cum-nostalgic-cum-facetious – travel of the mind. It’s an escape
from the everyday in the knowledge that no escape may be possible, or
perhaps even desirable. It’s the sort of travel you do when you’re living a
full life at home, thank you very much.
Earlier that year, Walker was in residence in Canberra,
which led to the showing of Somewhere Special at Houldsworth Fine Art in
London. This time, in still photographs and videos taken by her collaborator
Neil Bromwich, the inflatable snow-capped mountain-cum-sealed-tent is sited
in the Australian desert. The resulting composite scene is part natural
landscape, part human construction. It may be an idyllic place but only
because the artist has worked hard to make it so, bringing something from
her homeland to the foreign locale. Of course, even if Walker has found/made
somewhere special, she’s still – in the reproduction I’m considering –
looking off into the distance through camera lens. Well, of course she is –
on the lookout for somewhere even more special. Actually, the shadowed sand
and the flag and the heavy backpack and the capsule-shaped inflatable make
me think of astronauts on the moon. You don’t get anywhere more special than
that! Indeed, I’ve used transcripts of moon dialogues in my work before, as
has the painter Andrew Grassie, no doubt because they deserve a place in our
collective memory and imagination:
Buzz Aldrin: ‘Beautiful view.’
Neil Armstrong: ‘Isn’t that something! Magnificent sight out here.’
Buzz Aldrin: ‘Magnificent desolation.’
(long pause)
Walker tells me she likes this reference, because her
current project is In Search of a Small Planet. Partly inspired by moonlit
snow scenes this last winter at Berwick, partly engendered by recollections
of The Clangers which was a favourite TV programme when she was growing up,
she’s making a spherical, moon-like planet which she plans to take back to
her childhood home near Ben Lomond. She’ll push the three-metre diameter
plastic sphere from what was her bedroom window, and chase it through the
landscape with a butterfly net. What a great image! I can picture her
catching her very own moon. (Actually, it’s everybody’s moon. I recall
Shimabuku saying that the sight of the moon in the night sky when he was in
Brazil was identical to the view of the moon he was familiar with from
Japan, and so was an effective counter to homesickness.) And, moreover,
thanks to transcripts that owe as much to Microsoft as to NASA, I can hear a
conversation taking place on the surface of this very small, very special
planet of ours:
Shimabuku: ‘I am very positive to see Asian country now.’
Per Hüttner: ‘LA was super. I cannot wait to go back.’
Zoë Walker: ‘I have my home. It’s located in the landscape of Scotland and
it will never leave me no matter where I go.’
Shimabuku will be showing at Anthony Wilkinson Gallery, London, in 2003.
Per Hüttner has a solo exhibition at Raid Projects, Los
Angeles, 1 – 28 June 2002.
He showed at Platform in Vasa, Finland, in March – April 2002. He also
participated in Slowdive at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San
Francisco,
9 February – 26 April 2002.
Zoë Walker is included in Out of Place, 25 May – 27 June 2002, Bury St Edmunds Art Gallery, Suffolk. The show arising from her residency at Berwick Gymnasium is from 13 July – 25 August 2002.
Duncan McLaren is writing The Casebook of Non-Sherlock Holmes. One of its long stories, ‘The Strangled Cry of the Writer-in-Residence’, is published this month by Grizedale Arts