Ernesto Neto at Hayard Gallery

If dropped from outer space into the middle of Ernesto Neto's The Edges of the World at the Hayward Gallery in London's Southbank Centre, the befuddled observer might think she found herself in a surrealist camping store. Under a scrim of lime green nylon sky, rainbow-colored tents rise, their skins pulled taut over skeletons of industrially pre-fabricated, "flat pack" supports.



These tents would be completely impractical for the concerns of the conventional, terrestrial camper. Made of nylon stocking material, they would be highly permeable to the inevitable rainshowers that accompanying any decent camping expedition. As suggested by the intermittent, cylindrical apertures at upper right in the photoraph, they are also made literally porous, thus open to mosquitoes and other insectile visitors. These tents do, though, come with their own perfume; their skins are lined with chamomile, lavender and other herbs.



Unlike the grid structures of the floor and ceiling of the typical modernist art gallery (as visible in the photograph above), Neto's tents are variously and insistently biomorphic. Beyond their references to skin, pores and bones, these structures are anchored to the ground by bulbous, "feet." It is as if monsters are playing dress up in the nylon stockings from which the forms are made.

Now, Old Ken know very little about Señor Neto or the range of concerns in which he works. Closest to my ken is Tropicalia, an exhibition at the Barbican in London in 2006, which offered a vision of the psychedlic fusion of art, music and politics in 1960s-early '70s Brazil. The immersive environments and playful situations of that exhibition (a sandy beach constructed in the middle of the gallery for example), certainly recall the interests of Neto (who is also Brazilian). But, in the emphasis on multi-sensorial interactivity, shelters with nomadic impermanence and what might (evasively) be called "architectures of the impossible", Neto also seems to be pressing on a number of international, post-modernist buttons.



What was perhaps most satisfying about the whole enterprise, though, was the childlike wonder of the question I kept asking throughout it: how did they fabricate this? The contrast with recently-resurgent techniques like 3D visualization is suggestive. Whereas Avatar and its numerous imitators are created by acts of CGI wizardry that stand far beyond the comprehension of most viewers, Neto's environments are imminently comprehensible. Using everyday materials (press-board, nylon, gravel and so on) that are always visible as such to the viewer, we are nonetheless transported into a fictional world that approaches the sublime as we imaginatively reconstruct the incredible labor and skill required to make it. Anthropologist Alfred Gell has a telling phrase for exactly this kind of enterprise, which works its magic precisely by advertising its apparent humility. This both a technology of enchantment and an enchantment of technology.

Against a stultefying spectacle like Avatar, what feels to Old Ken as invigorating and refreshing about this "industrial light and magic" (to steal a phrase from George Lucas) is its demonstration of just how much world-making can be done with so little.

Simon Starling at The Clever Object

Not so long ago, yours truly was over on that other side of the pond where they make sure not to leave the crisps in the boot when they fill up the lorry with petrol. The reason? Nothing other than a seminar Old Ken likes to call Clever Object, in this case part three.

As has been the tradition of this seminar series, the discussion of historical cases and theoretical readings has been juxtaposed by conversation with contemporary artists. This time, the artist in question was 2005 winner of the Turner Prize, Simon Starling (who we see seated at the center of the picture above in what I can only charitably call a "nice" sweater).



Starling is perhaps best know for his work Shedboatshed (seen above) in which he transformed a garden shed into a boat, sailed it down a river, and re-installed it in the Tate as a shed. Now, to summarize the work in as cursory a manner as I have just done is certainly contrary to the spirit of Starling's practice. Not only is he a formidable raconteur who considers his stories (so he told the seminar) to be "part of the work, if not artworks themselves", but his objects have sufficiently long gestation that they effectively gather stories around them -- stories that Starling can prune and reshape. He becomes a curator of his objects' stories.



Suggestive of this way of working is an installation he developed at MassMoca called The Nanjing Particles. At the core of this project was a photograph (magnified and perforated in the installation shot above) representing Sampson's Shoe Factory which stood (or, possible still stands) opposite to MassMoca in far western Massachusetts. During a labor dispute in the 1870s century, the factory managers fired all the would-be unionizing workers, replacing them with Chinese laborers. We see these Chinese workers in the foreground of the repeated photographic image. Background as it appears to be in this installation shot, the photograph becomes both backstory and groundwork for Starling's subsequent intervention.

What he did was this: harvesting tiny deposits of silver crystals from the regions of the photograph punctured in the installation, Starling inspected the crystals at tremendous magnification with an electron microscope. Then, selecting a few crystals that seemed particularly interesting -- and that were neither excessively "figurative" nor otherwise referential -- he ran them through a 3-D modeling program, which gave them virtual dimensions. From these simulations, Starling then fabricated table-top objects - - globular things generated upon the extensively-modulated form of certain highly magnified crystals selected by the artist and then mediated through a software program.



Now, at least so it seems to Old Ken's pea brain, part of what is happening here is that Starling is offering a literalization and, consequently, a reductio ad absurdam of some of the more squishy sentiments expressed by dear M. Barthes in later life. If it is true that photographs are effectively contact relics embued with the trace of the things they depict, so Starling's objects seem to say, then here are those "depicted persons" -- those Chinese workers -- up close and personal. Or, if that's not convincing, then maybe we might reconsider our stories about exactly what it is that is happening in photographs.



I'll leave all of that to some photo-historian brainiacs and get back to Starling. Because after he was finished with his model-making, he sent them off to -- where else? -- China to have them transformed into these massive and massively-reflective objects.



The fact that the beholder cannot not but see themselves in the "telltale object" (in Starling's words) is certainly part of the point as is the fact that it has had to retrace its steps to China to be re-incarnated. For me, this is some of Starling's more compelling work. It spins its web and enables serious conceptual questioning out of an ordinary artifact, thus escaping the feeling of preciousness that clings to many of Starling's other, frequently art-based (if not art-obsessed) works. And whether or not we want to follow recent philosophers who have theorized the "constrained design" of scientific models as crucial to their ability to generate epistemic agency, it is by Old Ken's lights a liberating notion that a humble photograph of Chinese workers can, monad-like, generate this new world.

Putting the Pieces Together: St. Dunstan's in the East

As I realize that I am probably the only person who cares about this, there is perhaps no point in posting it. However, in the spirit of fun, I share it. What we are looking at is the clock face projecting off the north side of the church of St. Dunstan's in the East on London's Fleet Street, just to the east of the Royal Courts of Justice. As you can see at upper right, two bells hang in this little proscenium where, apparently, they would be struck by twin mechanized figures of Hercules who can be seen here bearing clubs.



Now, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the area around St. Dunstan's in the East was inhabited by clockmakers and other skilled craftsman. Although I am not sure of the date of this clock and display, it certainly pre-dates 1700. And we can know this thanks to a reference to the clock and its figures that appears in Ned Ward's picaresque travelogue, The London-Spy (ca. 1698-1700).

In Ward's delightful wicked tale, the Spy and his guide are traipsing around London when they come upon a pack of musicians performing. There, our two protagonists “stood a little, making our Ears do Pennance to please our Eyes, with the Conceited Motions of their Heads and Hands, which mov’d too and fro with as much deliberate Stiffness, as the two wooden Horologists at St. Dunstan’s, when they strike the Quarters.” Now, surely much of what Ward reports needs to be taken with a large grain of salt. That said, his reference to the clock as a way to characterize the motions of musical performers suggests that the Herculean figures were operational and sufficiently well know to serve in such a simile. I've just recently been re-reading Ward and was delighted to find this tid-bit!

Lions in the Street

"Lions in the street and roaming ..."



"... dogs in heat rabid foaming ... "



" ... a beast caged in the heart of the city."

How better than a little Jim Morrison to get the old story off and on its way? What we're looking at here are some pictures of Athens by the light of the full moon taken last night. Apparently, it is a long-standing custom here that, on such evening, the lights that normally illuminate the Parthenon are turned off and all comers are let up on the Acropolis for free.

Although the images don't really register the fact here, we were told that in the moonlight the marble of the Parthenon "glows." What I like about this photo are the silhouettes of the visitors in the foreground; indeed, in the moonlight, the mingling of shadows cast by people and fragments of the temple itself made the whole expanse look like a kind of gorgon's garden filled with the petrified handiwork of some sinister Medusa.

Such a poetic mood was clearly not taking in all of the visitors. One snatch of overheard conversation went as follows, between a Dutch tourist (speaking in English) and a local guard:

"Why are all the lights turned off?"

"This is done every full moon so that people can visit the temple."

"But I can't shoot my video!"

"Well, why don't you just enjoy being here and seeing the site for yourself?"

"But I can't shoot my VIDEO!"

The mind boggles! To recover from that nonsense and to reclaim the poetic mood, let's get back to Jim Morrison:



" ... one morning he awoke in a strange hotel, with the strange creature groaning beside him."



Okay, this was a strange hotel where I found myself waking up and sitting on the toilet. More disturbingly, I was trying to read this "sanskrit" on the back of the door. (Obviously, the worms who did this lovely eating didn't really know sanskrit, but that cut little ice in my dream-state).



I'm not sure what the problem was: maybe the room was too hot in this B & B in Dorset and I should have turned down the temperature on my Dimplex!



Or maybe it was the excessively loud ticking of this carriage clock on the mantle. A family heirloom, you say? Perhaps a retirement gift? Surely, too nice to just leave a fine clock like this in a guestroom in a B & B?



Or then again, maybe not! I picked up this P.O.S. expecting it to weigh five pounds or something and my hand nearly shot through the ceiling. What a piece of crap!



But, good times were had and dear friend Catherine was very kind to put us all up. Fun!

Gorgon Fun

In an essay from 1999 entitled "Cellini's Blood," art historian Michael Cole offers a fascinating reading Benvenuto Cellini's Perseus and Medusa (c 1550, Florence). Among the numerous interesting observations made in this award-winning article, Cole notes how the bronze blood streaming from Medusa's severed head and neck seem to have been referred to in period inventories as "gorgoni." And while seemingly related to the Greek word Gorgon that often designates Medusa herself, Cole argues that in the sixteenth century, gorgoni meant coral. Therefore, by understanding why these spurts of bronze blood would be likened to coral helps us to apprehend what period viewers thought of Cellini's sculpture and the narrative it represents. Cole then goes on to relate how, in period Italian translations of Ovid's "Metamorphoses", a mythical origin story of coral is told by the dripping of blood out of the head of Medusa as Perseus frees Andromeda.

Now, setting aside the various difficulties that may apply to Cole's reading of Cellini's bloods as corals, Old Ken was fascinated to see this 1679 depiction of the Perseus and Andromeda story in the Louvre. As Andromeda is being unchained by a cherub at right, Perseus strikes a pose at the center of Pierre Mignard's massive canvas, bloody sword by his side.

Here is the relevant story from Ovid as Cole gives it:

"Having killed the dragon, Perseus came down from the rock and sat on the bank of the sea to wash himself, for he was soaked with the dragon's blood. As he did this, the head of the Medusa got in his way, so he set it on the ground. So that the head did not crack, Perseus gathered some seaborne sticks of wood to set it on, and put them on the ground. Immediately those sticks hardened as stone does, and from the blood of the head they became vermillion. It is thus that coral is made, and this was the first coral."

Now, at Perseus' left foot in Mignard's painting is the severed head of Medusa, which still seems to wriggle with serpentine life. Moreover, as can be perceived even in this lousy detail, red sprigs of coral are clearly emerging from beneath the head, presumably from contact with the leaking blood (or perhaps just from contact with the head itself, depending on your version of Ovid).




In any case, what's interesting about Mignard's clear knowledge of this root-of-coral-from-the-severed-Medusa-head story is the light it sheds on a very disturbing painting now in the National Gallery in London. Known as "The Marquise de Seignelay and Two of her Sons" (1691), this painting shows (so we are told) the seated marquise "as the marine deity Thetis, and the elder child as Achilles, the son of Thetis." Fair enough - - and we could probably go through the iconography of Thetis and find the place of coral in it.





So, what I like about the connection with the Louvre painting is that it allows us to read this London portrait in another way. That is, perhaps we are to see the marquise as a kind of Medusa figure who is turning the green leaves in her hair into corals, gorgoni, right before our eyes. Implicitly, she would be having a similarly stiffening effect upon us ... but that's a story for another day.

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:

Cock Ale: A Good Idea Gone SO Wrong

Like so many things in this life, this idea began with a bucket. An empty bucket, mind you. It was in this perfectly innocent bucket that Old Ken would begin an experiment, an erstwhile wedding gift, and ultimately an environmental disaster. But one thing at a time.

A little backstory is necessary here: as you know if you are one of the maybe five people in the world who ever looks at this little trifle of a blog, yours truly was named for a debonair, swashbuckling bon vivant of a seventeenth century experimental philosopher—the man, the legend: Sir Kenelm Digby. As you may also recall, Sir Kenelm liked to cook. And, in a life with ample time devoted to the pleasures of the flesh, he amassed an impressive cookbook. Now, among the amazing recipes enclosed therein is one I have always wanted to try to make. Note, please, that I did not say "try" as in imbibe, because the recipe itself is for cock ale.

Cock ale: that means ale with cock in it. So, having a wedding to attend and needing to find a gift, Old Ken thought: "What better time could there be to try out this delicious recipe?" But, first, I needed some ingredients.

A trip down to the CostCutter supplied me with the cheap ale I would need.Somewhat more difficult to come by in South East London was a fresh cock. But, a shop in Chinatown in Soho provided this chicken (which I was willing to guess would be good enough). Please feel free, I should note parenthetically, to send along any bird flu jokes you might have heard. I have only a punchline and no joke, so please help me out.

Back to business, though. Now, I hear you saying: "Fair enough, Old Ken. But how do I get from ale and a chicken to cock ale?" Well, see, that's where the bucket comes in.
What you need to do now is put the cock in the bucket and then pour the ale on top of it. And I mean all of that delicious, succulent ale—don't be stingy! Finally, feel free to add a few cloves and cinnamon sticks. For the flavor, of course.



From here, you'll need to have access to a roof (preferably a flat one) and about two months' time to let the concoction brew.



Depending on your palate, it is at this point that cock ale either begins to get extremely tasty or threatens not only environing humanoid life but the rats, raccoons and cockroaches it might have attracted. For, even as you begin to move the bucket down from the roof, you may notice some highly pungent smells emanating from beneath the air-tight seal.



Once you have removed the tin foil, you may be surprised to see just how much the flesh of the chicken has decomposed. Indeed, it looks something like a chicken soup. Well, it would except for the thick layer of maggots floating on the putrid surface. The next task is to "pluck out the cock and throw him away," so Sir Kenelm tells us.



Done and done.



The next stage is a little tricky because you want to pour off the cock ale into the kind of bottle from which you will be drinking it on hot summer days but without spilling the precious contents down the side. Careful!



Finally, once you have transferred the fruits of your labor into proper receptacles, you can retrieve your cloves and cinnamon sticks from the bottom of the bucket. I see no problem with reusing them in other dishes (ideally, lightly flavored cakes, custards or biscuits where the musky savour of cock ale would really add that je-ne-sais-quoi).



When all is said and done, just hold the cock ale up to the light (well, make sure you're upwind from it) and admire its variegated colors and textures. Ideally, the maggots will not still be wriggling. Once you have finished with that, find a large dumpster and put all the cock ale in it. Then, remove your clothes and burn them.

PROOF!

Let us imagine that you were to find yourself in South London on a murky autumnal day. Haggard, mean-spirited people pass you on the street; scowling office workers grimace as they smoke in shirt sleeves in front of municipal buildings. But then, there on the ground before you lies a treasure, almost hidden below the scattered leaves, Tesco bags and discarded drink containers. It reads as follows:

"Wendnesday

We had a fun time at the beach and made fantastic sand castles. Then went to WOLWORTS and bourght 3 vidios."



Flipping this piece of sheer evidentiary gold over, we find:

"Thursday

Toaday I went to have a hair-cut then we went and had some fun at Panda's Palace."

Now, I'm not sure about you, but once Old Ken had finished weeping at the plangent pathos of this poetry, I set to work trying to interpret it. The narrator poses quite a challenge to the reader, emphasizing the plasticity of the English language, bending spellings to fit the mood. The initial syllable of Wednesday becomes the slightly more phonetic "Wendnesday," while the silent, penultimate syllable follows orthography - - as if to simultaneously break and follow the rules, thereby demonstrating their utter arbitrariness. While the discount chain "Wolworths" has lost its "h" and an emended "cemetery rule" governs the spelling of the word "video" (that is, apparently only 'i's are buried therein), the completed act of buying is subject to a fascinating remix. Part transposition of a famous, cold Russian beet soup, part imposition of the first-person plural possessive adjective "our" into the term of competed purchase itself, "bourght," I imagine, would rhyme with port or court.

But what of these Romantic destinations sketched with such intriguing outlines? "Panda's Palace" seems to be an attraction at Butlins Skegness - - one of three exciting Butlins UK resorts, which also include Bognor Regis and Minehead. In case you are interested in visiting, Butlins Skegness is near the town of Louth, which is, in turn, close to Alford, Horncastle, Spilsby and Wainfleet. Also nearby are Spilhorn, Castleby, Fordwain, Alfleet, Grimsby, Staines, Strood, Penge, and Steeple Bumsted.



But, like so many modern literary critics, I hear you impatiently asking: "But what does it mean?" Well, to a experimental philosopher like myself, it is less important to find "meaning" than to find proof. What is proof? Well, the Oxford English Dictionary defines proof as "that which makes good or proves a statement; evidence sufficient (or contributing) to establish a fact or produce belief in the certainty of something." I would submit that this poem proves that fun was critical to the self-conceptualization of the narrator's experience. For, on two consecutive days, the narrator describes him/herself as having had "fun," first at the beach making fantastic sand castles and then secondly at Panda's Palace.



Corroborating this evidence with the ludic experimentation with spelling noted above and it seems to this J. Hillis Miller that we have an air-tight case: some solid proof. And what better way is there to demonstrate that a claim has been proven than by stamping it with a "proof" stamp?

As the crimson ink of the stamp melds with the autograph script of the original poem, we can kick our heels back on a nearby table top, dip into a local wet bar or the ubiquitous pocket flask and reflect upon a job well done, a problem admirably solved, a point indisputably proven.

A Fun Game

How do you get to work? Or, please allow me to rephrase that question; do you go to work? I could mean a couple of things by that. I could be asking whether or not you are one of those new-fangled "e-commuters" who is able to work from home. At the same time, I could be asking whether or not you work at all; perhaps you have inherited a castle with a moat and you spend the day in a smoking jacket.



Well, like most folks, Old Ken goes to work (as what we call in Vera Cruz an "analista de sistemas") using the small object you see above: a London transport "Oyster Card." Why does it have that funny name? On the basis of its seeming ineffectuality as an aphrodisiac (a noted property of that most delicious shellfish), Old Ken is left to infer that the name has something to do with the fact that both objects (cerulean polyurethane card folder and oyster) both open up to reveal their contents. I'm not sure if we can push the analogy much further than that; but that too would be a fun game.



To return to my story, though; when you are on the Tube in London, you will see people reading, listening to music, staring at their hands—seemingly anything other than making eye contact or (heaven forbid!) conversing. Usually Old Ken joins them, reading a book or one of those soul-sucking "newspapers" handed out for free in Tube stations. Yet, recently, having grown weary of the burden of carrying around a novel on top of those other implements necessary to the art—scratch that, science—of the analista de sistemas, Old Ken has sought out a new kind of transport entertainment.



Perhaps inspired by those VIPS scribbling critical things into PDAs on their way (ASAP) to get a little RNR, Old Ken realized that the Oyster Card portfolio could be put to a more aesthetic use. Removing the enclosed map, which seemed to cover the entirety of southeast England and parts of Holland, I tore and folded a few sheets of drawing paper so that they could fit into the portfolio's external pocket. Holding the portfolio fairly close to one's body (as is requisite on a crowded Tube) and using a heavily ink-saturated drawing tool (such as a Sharpie), it is possible to make quick gestural sketches of folks on the train or waiting at the platform relatively inconspicuously.

Here are a few examples. As you will see, they are pretty crap. But, Old Ken would submit that it is an interesting experiment to try to adapt one's hand-eye coordination to the demands of working rapidly on such a small surface and with one's limbs basically compressed in upon the torso. As Jack White once said of his two person band: "It wouldn't excite me if there weren't those limitations, if we weren't living in that box, if we weren't trapped." Wise words.


Here, you'll see a vignette of some people waiting for the bus in that most attractive of all possible hams—Lewisham; and a creepy-looking man on the Tube, who sufficiently evoked a character in a Francis Bacon painting that I thought I'd share him with you. Whee!

Kiss the Cat!

After the last post relating the experimental results of an extremely philosophical meal, Old Ken has received a few queries. Many of you know of my long-standing vegetarianism—the product of an ill-fated encounter with moose-meat stew many, many years ago. Therefore, these interrogators have plausibly asked, was it difficult to prepare and cook herring? And, more specifically, how did the O.K. (Old Ken, that is) feel about probing poor, defenseless herring so profoundly?

Well, well. Difficult questions, these. But, by way of an answer, I would submit that my perseverance in the quest for knowledge suggests the extent the O.K. is willing to go for (a) the pursuit of experimental philosophy and (b) kinship with that treasured pearl of modern life, family. So, in light of these pointed queries, the present post may appear a kind of groveling supplication—a crass effort to re-establish my concern-for-animals "street cred." Again, marksman, you are on target. And, to mix metaphors still further, I lower my mask and scream "touché!" But then again, what I want to share with you is not truly a wee beast, but a magnificent work of public sculpture known with great affection in south east London as "the Catford Cat."



Once upon a time, there was a man from a place who stayed in a guest house in Catford. Perhaps, he had just arrived in greater London; he might even have just disembarked after a long plane flight and lugged a heavy suitcase from a major, London-area airport all the way to Catford to stay in a guest house he had seen advertised on the internet. Let us say that that guest house was unexpectedly closed as the proprietor had perhaps gone to a spiritual revival in Ethiopia. For the sake of conversation, let's say that this now homeless visitor to Catford sat forlornly on his suitcase, sweating in the sun of late August, pondering his prospects. What was it that caused his eyes and (dare I say?) his hopes to turn upwards? As always, Old Ken likes to keep speculations on such matters to a minimum. But, again hypothetically, whatever might have caused this stranger—this midnight rambler, this drifter ... this man from a place—to cast his gaze toward the heavens, it was there that they met a truly majestic sight: the Catford Cat.



What kind of role should sculpture have in contemporary public space? Should it be the object of reverent attention, of everyday use, or of critique of the social world into which it is cast? The Catford Cat poses these questions in interesting ways. Stealthily poised on a sign advertising the Catford Shopping Center—not entirely like a steel worker in those staggering photographs depicting the construction of skyscrapers in New York City—our massive feline friend appears ready to strike. It resembles less a domestic cat or even those feral critters known to scamper down the streets of south-eastern London with purloined jellied eels in their jaws; indeed, its pronounced musculature, taut ears and tail make it appear more like the ferocious puma or the notorious mountain lion.



Positioned above the sidewalk and thus out of the observer's reach, the Catford Cat seems to anticipate and luxuriate in its own visibility. I mean look at those eyes! Enormous, trained intently on some mysterious object upon which our kitty seems to be coiling up to release a devastating blow, these bumblebee orbs point up a basic characteristic of our levitating friend. That is, Kitty (presumably made of some sort of roughly-textured stucco) has been painted. In earlier times, the painting of sculptures was a subject of some serious consternation in Protestant lands. Known in Spanish by the telling name "encarnación," poly-chrome sculpture raised the ire of Protestant theologians for whom it came a bit to close of violating the Mosaic prohibition of graven images. (Indeed, to Old Ken's mind, the Catford Cat might well be the most visible example of poly-chrome sculpture in London—although I reserve the right to utterly repudiate that hypothesis in the future). Close, but tantalizingly out of reach; seemingly humble in its evocation of the domestic, yet monstrous in apparent strength and scale; might we not imagine the Catford Cat to, in fact, be the logical extension and contemporary extension of religious sculpture? When we look into the eyes of the Catford Cat, in other words, do we not see all that is truly holy in this world?