The Self-Isolation Residency 24th April 2020: Day 26

Exploring Installation No. 2: 'The Fifth Column', The Triangle, 2009, Antony Clarkson

 I hope that you will indulge me as I return to my series of retrospective posts about my installation work? Most of today has been spent working very heavily on my self portrait and although this means that the painting is now nearly complete it also means that its is very glossy with oil, particularly the darker areas which does in fairness encompass most of the painting, making it virtually impossible to photograph. So instead I'm going to be introducing you to the second of my true installation pieces: 'The Fifth Column'. 

In 2009  I exhibited in and curated a group exhibited at The Triangle in Manchester entitled 'Where the garment gapes'. The title is a quote from Roland Barthes work 'The Pleasure of the Text' which postulates that the most erotic of glimpses is that which just tantalises, as we hoped to do with this exhibition. For me this was another seminal exhibition experience, one of the ones that helped to form my installation style. As with 'Tension' I began this piece by visiting the space on numerous occasions to start my conversation with it. During one of these visits I became fascinated by two columns that where part of the architectural space or so I at first thought. One closer examination of the  columns I realised that they were in fact modern additions to the structure of the space, probably put in the space to conceal ugly I beams of something of that nature and were otherwise, although very large completely hollow. It was this 'hollowness', this artifice that intrigued me  and set me on the direction for the piece I would later create especially for this space. Once again I can't state strongly enough how important this idea of my pieces being 'situation-specific' is, as you will see the piece that I went onto create for this space only has relevance to this space, if it were to be exhibited elsewhere it would be totally meaningless. In this space the piece that I intended to create would talk about both our trust and unquestioning acceptance of the everyday; how we don't 'question our teaspoons' (Perec), nearly enough.

Having been captured by the artifice of the two existing columns I decided to take the game one stage further. I resolved that I really wanted to challenge the observers blind devotion to a space by showing them just how untrustworthy that space could actually be. To this end I had a third column fabricated to the exact dimensions or the other two in polystyrene. The only difference was that my column was 1cm shorter than the existing columns so if you looked very carefully you would realise that it didn't quite make contact with the ceiling, thus proving its functionlessness.  When people entered the space they would take it at face value, they would be looking at the art nit the architecture and so would pass my piece by which in many ways was what I wanted from it. i even went so far as to re-title the piece for the exhibition catalogue where is was other identified as a certain cubic quantity of polystyrene.

I must say that this was one of the most satisfying pieces I ever created and it actually had one more trick up its sleeve. Everyday I went to the exhibition before it opened and repositioned the column in a different place in the space thus increasing the observers feelings of the uncanny; I happily use that surrealist term in reference to this piece. I was gratified to have it proved to me that this worked when a old Professor of mine, who knew about the piece, walked into the space one day, right past the column and then proceeded to ask me where it was?

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