Tim Head
Chatham Dockyard is a vast acreage of Georgian buildings which once housed the construction industry for the Royal Navy. Sited on the banks of the River Medway, Chatham is an hour east of Greenwich, by modern transport. England's 'Wooden Walls', her Naval defences, were fashioned here, including Nelson's flagship 'Victory'. Now Chatham Historic Dockyard is a conserved exhibit where 'the whole family can enjoy a day out'.
For a month, daytrippers have been happening upon something rather out of kilter with the surrounding themed experience. In Number Three Covered Slip, Tim Head has installed the anomalous work, Blue Skies, in which two huge, flat, black cows spin high on a wall, whilst giant black and white florets carpet the floor below.
The appellation 'Number Three Covered Slip', ringing with clipped Naval tones, is self-effacing name belying the immense size of this physically challenging building. One enters the installation space by climbing a spiral wooden stair, leaving below the detritus of shipbuilding huge unhewn timbers and hefty metal lunks and emerging into a space that defies human scale. This mezzanine platform is some four and a half thousand metres square. The wood-beamed roof, an inverse hull structure, rises twelve metres above one's feet: to say that one feels puny by comparison is a fair estimation of the situation.
But one is not just dwarfed by the sheer immensity of the Slip, one is also crushed by history. The achievements of the past occupants of the building, the shipbuilders, daunt the 20th century visitor. This is where Blue Skies operates as an installation in this space of wonder. But does it work both backwards (regarding the past) and forwards (regarding the future)? Blue sky thinking is synonymous with wonder for the future. It is Silicon Valley speak. One imagines that Bill Gates has done a fair amount of blue sky projection up in Seattle. No bruising fin de siècle foreboding for him: he is optimistically rendering the digital future in real time now.
Billed as a 'virtual landscape', Blue Skies means to engage with issues of the electronic future by distending representations of the 'natural'. Arrayed across the floor, the large flowers tilt, in a cartoon-fashion, towards stray sunbeams. These are the simple blooms that protruded from Ermintrude's mouth in the past times of The Magic Roundabout. They are black and white renditions of the generic child's flower five pudgy petals emanating from a central disc. Their outsize fantasy simulates a monochrome Disney experience. Sadly, they are cordoned off by a barrier that presents an allusion to the electronic: the screen's definition of virtual limits. How much more fun it would be if one could wander through this cartoon meadow.
When expansion of scale is applied to the cow spinning above the flowers, the fun becomes less innocent. Doubt is incurred by the addition of animation to the represented forms. Two black, bovine silhouettes revolve asynchronously, high up on the back wall of the Slip. This is no regular byre wall it was knocked out at the completion of each ship's construction, releasing the vessel on to the River Medway. Now, the hefty cut-out Daisies rotate, seemingly in a benign fashion, legs and tails akimbo, udders pendulous. But their mistimed movement infects their simple representation, suggesting machines out of control, whilst their over-fed bodies (the stereotypical outline of a British herd cow) emphasise the function we impose on them a cash crop on spindly legs. With its proliferation of fake florescence, the simulated pasture below begins to suggest viral pollutants.
The artificial and the wonky are suggested by Blue Skies in a cartoon-style fashion but it is difficult to keep facile 'mad cow' thoughts at bay. More discrepancy than was intended by the installation resides in using pastoral iconography in a Georgian building, to comment on the digital. The black and white rendition may refer to the binary operations in every computer, but nostalgia is evoked by the representations of childhood figures in a historicised space. In this situation, it is nostalgia for the past, not a nostalgia for the future, when loss is anticipated. As such, Blue Skies operates in the space of looking backwards, rather than in the space of wonder the blue sky of the future where the hundreds of boatbuilders who laboured at Chatham projected the voyage of their endeavours. The mighty Royal Navy vessels were sailing out into that virtual reality, the future of history.
