Gas Leak? In Peckham? SIGN ME UP!

While performing some sort of "experiment" with a jeweller's blow torch, artists Lou Smith, Lorraine Liyanage and Matthew Venn discovered that heated air passing through a length of tube will create some strange effects. What they have created in "The Gas Organ" is an elaboration of said effects at larger scale.


They have affixed four plumbers' torches to the base of four glass tubes of varying lengths and installed them below the arches of the Sassoon Gallery just behind Peckham Rye station. Two of these torches have additionally been connected to a remote control handset (see image below) such that the flow of gas through the torch can be adjusted by the visitor.

Although the smell and luminous display offered by the organ were perhaps not quite as striking as they might have been with an installation in another space, the sound was truly amazing. Through principles (perhaps convection?) that could no doubt be explained better by the readers of nicebirdrox.com than by Old Ken himself, the heated air creates these wonderfully deep, lugubrious tones, which are altered by the length of the tubes themselves and the rate of the gas being consumed. It made me think of the songs of whales.

Now, although it was never addressed (so far as I could tell) in the promotional literature about the piece, to stage a spectacle like in London in 2007 is to flout what have become major talking-points. That is, consciousness of the effects of fossil fuel usage in exacerbating global warming are ubiquitous and attention to the "carbon footprint" of nations—even individuals—is an increasingly common concern. Thus, on the one hand, it is hard not to look at an event like "Gas Organ" as an irresponsible, arrogant delight in conspicuous consumption. After all, the handset allows the visitor to effortlessly control the rate at which fossil fuel is consumed and then take pleasure in the visual, aural and other effects of this wastage.




All this made Old Ken think of the very strange writing about sacrifice by that very strange character Georges Bataille. What Bataille seems to say (I think) is that what happens in rituals of sacrifice is that some entity, which is normally bound by all kinds of utilitarian concerns and regulations, is withdrawn from the realm of practical concern and violently destroyed. This sacrifice makes the entity (whether an animal, person, or otherwise) holy insofar as it liberates it from mundane, rationalized calculations and gathers a community together around the spectacle of literally useless consumption. If this is so, then we might think of the consumed cannisters of gas piled in the corner of the gallery beside the Gas Organ (of which I, sadly, did not get a shot) as like so many skulls stacked around an Aztec altar. Or, we could connect the moaning sound of the Organ itself to the great leviathans of the sea, which not only provided the oil of the nineteenth century but which were harvested, so Herman Melville tells us in "Moby Dick," in a similarly profligate way with little concern for salvaging any more from the whales than their spermaceti and oil-yielding blubber.

I'm not sure if any of this justifies the environmental ethics of "The Gas Organ." But, I do think it might help to explain the gleeful pleasure and lack of expressed concern with which the visitors—many of whom may well have arrived to the gallery on bicycles or in hybrid cars—delighted in the consumption of fossil fuels. The pleasure is the pointlessness of it all. Or, to say it a little differently, the delight comes from the liberation of gas from the normal, practical functions of bending pipes or cooking sausages and allowing its properties to shine forth as aesthetic effects of light, sound, and smell. Not only does the sound of the Organ seem somehow primordial, but Old Ken's observation would be that the act—the sacrifice—at its heart compels because it addresses a similarly atavistic impulse.

Well, if you don't believe me, take a listen to this jackass: