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RODDY HUNTER
[The Noise of] The Street Enters The House Here's how it happened about 6.00pm on 10th january. in the room was a mattress lying next to a radiator. There was a dead bird I'd rescued from the gutter outside 26 Moira Place the day before. There was also a lightbox on a table facing the other wall. Oh, I forgot that there was also an old, mangy, pink, presumably woman's coat, lying on the mattress too. The coat, and the mattress like the bird had been salvaged from the street a couple of days before after a heavy downpour of rain. I found these in the streets surrounding Miora Place. [There were also black tape marks on the floor, a hammer beneath the table and chalk marks showing the outline of where light came through the window, discarded elements of the process leading up to the installation.] Anyway, to go back to the lightbox. There were slides on it, photographic slides I¹d taken of an abandoned housing project for phosphorous miners and their families in Zhanatas, Kazakhstan. In recent years the inhabitants of District No7 [or was it No.9?] protested against job losses in temperatures of -10 degrees or colder. over 100 began a hunger strike. I found out about this on the internet after returning from Kazakhstan, nobody told me about this when I was there. Although my visit there was recent, I can never immediately recall like in conversation when I went to Kazakhstan in particular to that place, Zhanatas. OComparative trauma¹, there¹s an impossible subject. the artist as an ethnographer can yield villainous consequences and when the artist enthographises him or herself you start to drown in a psycho-cultural feedback loop of self destructive proportions. the work, that is the installation and the events that occured following 6.00pm on 10th January 2004 at 26 moira Place, synthesised together in an installation, an 'integral construction' entitled '[The Noise of ]The Street Enters The House [The Noise of] The House Enters The Street'. This concerns the psychic effects of urbanism upon domestic and public space. Umberto Boccioni's painting 'The Street Enters The House' provides and axis to consider these concerns. A digital reproduction of the painting taken from a page in a little Hungarian book on futurism I read in Budapest hangs on a wall above the lightbox. the reproduction contains the title of the work as 'Az Uica Zata Betöna Szbábá', which is to say '[The Noise of The Street] Enters The House'. I've always seen the title described as 'The Street Enters The House'..leaving off the noise bit. [This was explained during the performance on a mini disk Hunter had made previously when he was walking around the streets of Adamsdown in Cardiff where Trace is situated] So, Here's what happened. I rolled up the blinds and opened the
windows to let the sound from the inside meet the noise from the
outside. I'd waited from the room to go quiet. I rolled the blinds
back down so we¹d think more about aural rather than visual
concerns and because I was probably going to take my cloths off
later. [The story of removing the windows. Utopian artwork and social
depravation. Sound lop; through the building, build a life size
maquette, bringing in the pavement..actually it all started with
the Arcades [re: WalterBenjamin & also Cardiff is called the
'City of Arcades'] with 'porosity', with psychic effects of producing,
and thus being able to commodify a capitalist/corporalist space
of exchange..oh, yeah, and we wanted the room to be cold, really
cold, but an industrial air conditioner cost £180 per day
and we couldn't afford it....In the end, I opened the windows chalked
a crack from the window across the floor, sit at the lightbox, look
at slides, wear elastoplast, take temperature, go to mattress, take
the temperature of the bird, wear elastoplasts on my eyes, so I
can't see, undress /dress in old coat, ask for hammer and masonry
chisel, make a new crack across the floor with a hammer and masonry
chisel, return/ dress, take thermometer, place on lightbox, look
at slides, chalk line on crack and close the windows. |
