The installation Class reflects on how systems of social testing, exclusion/inclusion, enshrined in law and culture, may be diffused in the classroom, and in civic architecture, with implications for European (and particularly British) notions of national identity and otherness. English school rulers showing both imperial and metric/decimal units are used throughout the work: a subliminal reference to the uneasy coexistence of traditional and progressive values in Britain. The metaphor of competing systems of measurement is reiterated in arrangements of elements based on groups of 12 (inches per imperial foot) and 10 (the fundamental decimal principle).
The work involves diverse elements. In one version inverted fruit picking ladders are arranged in echo of the confrontational seating arrangements in the House of Commons, with rows of suspended tape players reiterating fragments of oppositional rhetoric across a dividing line of blue institutional lamps fixed to the floor.
Installation view, City Gallery Leicester
At the top of each ladder is a 35mm slide projector directed towards the opposite wall: slide projections form a frieze along the walls of the space, where chalk-line drawings show a tangle of allegorical figures: Dancing Pawns; Dead Monarch; Dead Minister; Cash Skirt; Inverts...
Installation detail 'Dead Monarch', City Gallery Leicester
Along the upper edge of the frieze are school rulers carrying maxims from the exterior of the Harris Museum and Art Gallery in Preston, Lancashire (co-commissioners of the work): ON EARTH THERE IS NOTHING GREAT BUT MAN; IN MAN THERE IS NOTHING GREAT BUT MIND; RICHES YOU MAY HERE ACQUIRE; COMMUNITIES EXIST FOR HONOURABLE DEEDS... These inscriptions are taken from architectural drawings of a building somewhat typical of a style of civic architecture which employs its own facades to declare its mission.
The work includes a single screen video projection. Early versions of the installation included a re-working of the Queen's Christmas Speech - broadcast throughout Britain every year. A fragment of this re-working is employed later in Bothered (Black Rod).
video clip
A later version of Class for Berlin includes an edition of school rulers with complimentary maxims: jus soli - the law according to soil and jus sanquinis - the law according to blood. The 'law according to soil' forms a physical barrier across the space, whilst in a video projection a single male figure undergoes a ritual self-measurement using two rulers inscribed 'the law according to blood'.
Installation view, Kunst-Werke Berlin
Also included is a projected postcard image showing a group of children at a garden fete symbolically dressed to represent both social roles, and the individual countries within the United Kingdom. Institutional lights with black power-supply trunking are superimposed like a decimal calibration along the image.
Installation view, Kunst-Werke Berlin
School desks with illuminated image/text plates are included in all versions of the installation. The later Berlin version uses six desks identical to the self-contained work After Tom Brown's Schooldays.
Installation view, studio
Funding and exhibition details
Funded: The Harris Art Gallery Preston/Leicester International Video Festival, 1990
First shown: City Gallery Leicester 1990; 2nd version, Kunst-Werke Berlin 1993
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