Publication:
Shakkei, Winter 2008/09

Headline:
The Tatton Park Biennial

Selected editorial:

By Paul Griffiths

The first of these is a construction by Heather and Ivan Morison, sited beside Golden Brook, titled, I am so sorry. Goodbye (Escape Vehicle number 4). It comprises two intersecting geodesic spheres (think Buckminster Fuller), hand-built from wood harvested from naturally fallen trees in Tatton Park, and functions as shelter, observatory and performance space, where visitors are served tea. The Morisons’ ‘escape vehicle’ unifies two acts, of making and use, in a way that can be read as a complex set of social rituals.

At one level, the artists are concerned with their general experiences, development of ideas and memories. These include, first, an interest in making such structures that originates in social and architectural ideas from the late sixties and seventies, and second, their experiences of being served tea in China, Japan, Mongolia and elsewhere. We can imagine the next significant step, the inception of their project as part of the Biennial, as a complex ritual, as well as practical, interaction with Tatton personal and the curators. The part of this that we are told about is the key moment in which the necessary wood was harvested for the artists by Tatton Park’s Rangers. Then, unifying making and use, we have the artists themselves, who build the Escape Vehicle, and who will also be hosts to its visitors. And the visitors can be understood as mirroring the role of the Rangers and, at the same time, as turning our attention back outwards, beyond the Park, to the wider world, whence the visitors come and which, in a sense, they represent.

There is an aspect of this work that is not so easily brought to analytical heel. The catalogue entry tells us that the Vehicle’s visitors receive their tea from “a ‘guardian’, whose vocabulary is limited to a handful of words [and whose] clothes and language work together with the structure to present an amalgam of cultural references, past and present, creating a situation that may also be read as a possible future.” This is the point at which I begin to make sense of the work’s title, with its suggestion of regret at an inevitable parting; a parting anticipated by the preparation of a means of Escape. Now we can receive the whole work, in its distant, imagined beginnings and present making and use, as a ritual of meetings and partings, in which all the difficulties of articulation and mutual understanding between strangers are subsumed and transformed in that act of sharing tea. The implied corollary of such sharing is that we all eventually Go Back Home...

The Morisons’ and Blandy’s works may seem to have little in common, beyond their performative elements and their interest in addressing the relationships between cultures. Yet I think the success of the Tatton Park Biennial, as put on record by the catalogue, is that all the work included in the event proposes some kind of challenge to our understandings of cultural difference, sometimes specifically in the context of the kind of ‘heritage’ embodied in a site like Tatton Park but also more broadly.

The more I think about it, the more I understand the Morisons and Blandy to be addressing what is possible and not possible in terms of cross-cultural identification. It might seem that the Morisons are primarily concerned with what is possible. Yet, even if we might slip past the title of their work unharmed, we are still stuck with the verbal incoherence of the Escape Vehicle’s guardian. Blandy is more openly concerned with what is possible and not possible. Mirroring the incoherence of Morisons’ guardian, Blandy’s Barefoot Lone Pilgrim is articulately ‘comic’: his failed heroic stance is rescued by its own comedy, while his use of the comic format for some of his work locates the centre of gravity of the whole problem somewhere in the child-like dreaming mind. What is achieved through the pathos of regret in the Morison’s work is achieved through the poignancy of humour in Blandy’s.