Being involved to some extent in the planning of the installation I am intrigued by what seemed at first to be a simple miscalculation in the amount of time scheduled for the work to be put up.
Making the usual assumptions, and running through the process in our minds it seemed reasonable that, with enough bodies, the work could be done in a week, with a few days spare. Two days into the installation it became painfully obvious that it would be extremely tight, if not impossible, no matter how many people we got in to help.
I got very grumpy at this point, mainly because I felt entirely responsible for what was looking like a disastrous error, grumpiness doesn’t help much in that situation. Jonathan came to the rescue by making the process just about as efficient as was possible, but it still didn’t look good.
Then Vincent, who was probably more concerned than the rest of us, said something.
He said “I would usually need a month to do this work”
For me this was a bit of an epiphany, We had made the huge assumption that this work was an installation, however it was actually a work in progress. Being used to installed works being pre-planned and executed, like some sort of fitted kitchen, we had entirely overlooked the un-delegatable nature of the task that Vincent was performing. Of course getting more people wouldn’t help, we needed more Vincent. The answer was to adjust the work-flow so that Vincent only spent time doing what couldn’t feasibly be done by others. It worked.
This led me to consider just how few works are actually made in-situ, anything that can’t be carried is usually planned, in advance, in some abstract form, using tried and tested techniques, then assembled as efficiently as possible. Not that this is a bad thing, it is just a process that requires a good deal of prediction, participation in the final form tends toward solving problems of conformity, of unforeseen variations on the pre-existing plan. – working in this manner means that at the point of construction, the actual site is likely to force compromise on the plan.
Of course it makes good financial sense, but it means the works relationship with its context is pre-conceived and to some extent assumed rather than authentic.
come to think of it, many large works often attempt to retain a bit of the unplanned, the unpredictable about them. But this is usually added as a final treatment, a finish that gets applied at the end – This puts me in mind of a certain brand of 'focacia' bread which undergoes a single daub from latex gloved fingers as it passes on the conveyor belt, allowing it to be sold as 'Hand finished'.
Vincent has, I think, bravely managed to keep the unknown outcome a major part of this work, throughout. I admire him for it.
