Catalogue: The Turnpike Gallery Quarterly

Catalogue: Overnight Delivery
Catalogue text: Overnight Delivery by Michael Stanley

Catalogue: A Ruined Future
Catalogue text: A Ruined Future by Richard Williams

Catalogue: The Turnpike Gallery Quarterly
Published by the Turnpike Gallery, Leigh, England, 1997

Catalogue: Overnight Delivery
Published by The Turnpike Gallery, Leigh, England, 1997

Catalogue text: Overnight Delivery by Michael Stanley
From Overnight Delivery catalogue
Published by The Turnpike Gallery, Leigh, England, 1997

A product of the architectural drawing boards of the late 1970s, the Turnpike Centre in Leigh rises incongruously against a backdrop dominated by the Victorian buildings of the town’s Civic Square. Though architecturally dissimilar, its function closely follows that of the Victorian model in its civic gesture to provide culture and learning for its local community. From Victorian classificatory systems to the spirited utopianism of the sixties, a quest for such knowledge and education has continually been equated with a vision of social progress and deliverance into a new world order. In Overnight Delivery, issues of progress, deliverance and knowledge are playfully explored in the shadow of the oncoming Millennium and the impact of the supposed new ‘digital revolution’.

Situated on the gallery rooftop, Overnight Delivery is both an intervention into and an appropriation of the present and absent architectural features of the Turnpike building. In researching the project, KIT have unearthed the initial blueprints of the Turnpike Centre, identifying original proposals for a civic theatre which, due to funding limitations, was never completed. This unrealised stage-set becomes the site and point of departure for KIT’s response to the Turnpike building. Overnight Delivery feeds into the language of the theatrical. Suspended on the gallery’s external wall is a 20ft by 10ft inkjet printed canvas. The image was taken in an American theme park and depicts a scene in which life-sized model reindeers stand aghast to see an approaching UFO. It acts as a Disney-like backdrop to the centre stage activity in which three dome-shaped air vents have been given a make over to appear as kindergarten size UFOs. They hover above freshly laid turf, its roots manured with over 300 books which have been removed from library circulation. Typically, KIT’s installation offers a diverse and multi-layered approach to its interpretation.

Informing the work has been research into cult movements originating in Papua New Guinea in the 1920s which anticipated future technological deliverance called ‘Cargo Cults’. Ronald Bernt describes Cargo Cults as:

...usually revivalist, and in some cases messianic and millenarian, movements found among certain peoples indigenous to Oceania. The word cargo refers to foreign goods possessed by Europeans; cult adherents believe that such goods belong to themselves and that, with the help of ancestral spirits, the goods can be returned to them through magico-religious means. Some cult prophets promise that the arrival of cargo will herald a period of prosperity and well-being. Such movements represent the efforts of local inhabitants to cope with problems arising from contact with foreign cultures’ acculturation.

In Overnight Delivery, UFOs become the symbol of the current fascination with the unknown, anticipation of the new Millennium and a conception of deliverance or technological prosperity at the hands of an alien technological power. A belief in the redemptive powers of new technologies has become a symptom of the growing millennial fever. Promises of the internet and the global community have become a feature of the rhetoric surrounding the millennium celebrations.

On a rooftop in Leigh, in the north of England, KIT’s shrine-like installation to the promise of a technological utopia hovers between the tragic and the comic, between transcendence and an earthly reality. In keeping with much of their work, there is a synthesis in the use of new technologies with the physical stuff of earth, mud and grass. The burial of library books underneath turf appears to point to the death of the written page and to the extinction of the ‘library’ as site for communal, social practice. It evokes the millennial image of Huxley’s savage roaming the landscape, pointlessly reciting extracts from the Bible in a Brave New World where technology is the new God.

In KIT’s work, the position which technology has to natural environment is an intriguing one. In Overnight Delivery, and recent projects, technology tends to co-exist rather than conflict with the physical geography, challenging the traditional nature versus culture debate. New media, be it the internet or digital imaging is the channel through which the landscape is mediated and represented. In KIT’s futuristic vision there is an interplay between virtual, physical and natural space, in which all seemingly become the site of political, social and cultural contention. Twelve months on, Overnight Delivery is still located on the rooftop of the Turnpike Gallery. Overgrown and neglected, it appears as a weather-beaten monument to a recent past, reflecting the lost optimism of the surrounding seventies architecture, a counterfeit ruin in the urban landscape.

Catalogue: A Ruined Future
Published by the Annual Program, Manchester, England, 1997

Catalogue text: A Ruined Future by Richard Williams
From A Ruined Future catalogue
Published by the Annual Program, Manchester, England, 1997

In December 1967, the American artist Robert Smithson published “The Monuments of Passaic”. It described the visit to the city of Passaic, New Jersey, a half – hour bus ride from New York City. The city is not dissimilar to many other towns that surround Manchester: predominantly industrial and wearing more scars then embellishments. Smithson wrote about Passaic in the manner of a 19th century tourist making the Grand Tour and the city became in effect the artist’s Rome. He described his journey there, his reading material, the weather, and then the “Monuments” themselves, each of which was photographed on a Kodak Instamatic, retaining the distinctive 126 - format when the pictures were published. None of Smithson’s “Monuments” were sites of conventional touristic interests, being aspects of a chaotic landscape created by the construction of a six – lane highway along the banks of the Passaic River. The “Monument with Pontoons” was therefore the machinery for draining the site; six pipes spewing industrial waste became “The Fountain Monument;” a vast drain under construction was “The Great Pipes Monument”. Although the scene was one of construction Smithson, perversely, described it in terms of the ruin... He wrote:

“That zero panorama seemed to contain ruins in reverse, that is – all the new construction that would eventually be built. This is the opposite of the “Romantic Ruin” because buildings don’t fall into ruin after they are built but rather rise into ruin before they are built.”

Here at the Turnpike Gallery you see the work of the Manchester-based collective, KIT. It was not made in response to Smithson, nor under his influence. Smithson’s concept of the ruin, however, helps us make some useful remarks about their work.

Instead of choosing the exhibition space KIT have used the curious site of the library roof. Not usually open to the public, it is the place for skylights, ventilation equipment, fire exits, and a metal hut for the new central heating system. It is also the site of the lost future of the building: a crude whitewashed brick wall, in stark contrast with the elaborate concrete skin of the rest of the building, forms one edge of the gallery’s exterior. Looking more closely, we see a series of concrete stumps on the roof surface, arranged in a regular pattern, but serving no immediate purpose. They are the foundations for a theatre, originally planned for the Turnpike complex, but abandoned for economic reasons. We might say that Smithson’s notion of ruined future returns on the Turnpike roof.

KIT’s original proposal consisted in turfing the entire roof: underneath the turf, mounds of books would have been buried in irregular piles, giving the appearance of overgrown ruins, and the surface of the turf marked out with a pattern derived from a football pitch. The results would then have been photographed from the air. The project would, in their words, resonate with “ideas of history, architecture, ruins, sightseeing, football” as part of a “continuing project to intervene in the mapping of past and present.”

Earlier projects have included “KIT Homes”, realised at the Saints Peter and Paul High School in Widnes, in which students were asked to draw plans of their ideal homes, which were then drawn onto the school’s football pitch with a line marker, the results photographed from an aircraft. As the pitches were shortly to disappear underneath a new housing development, along with the rest of the school, the project played with the past and future histories of the site, using it as the basis for fantasy before it vanished beneath the prosaic reality of the development.