This work relates to an earlier, unrealised, film work titled The Revel Fox. The film was ‘unrealised’ due to two reasons – firstly, I was at the time engaged in the conceptual dogma framed as All Theory. No Practice. which excluded the material manifestation of any artworks as has been detailed earlier in this book. Secondly, the principle subject of the film – a South African architect named Revel Fox – unfortunately died whilst I was engaged in said dogma.
There remains some regret that the project The Revel Fox was not made timeously. The resulting work, titled Insects cannot know love, is a grotesque and corporeal requiem to this project; this architect I never met and, in part, to my former way of working. The domestic minimalism of the laundry drying rack originally intended for The Revel Fox has morphed and grown into its mutated twin – an exhumed, museological relic, laboriously inching its way out of the archive since 2004. Seemingly the product of bizarre biological folly or unorthodox zoological deformity, the sculpture tries to articulate – in a polemical form through abstract sculptural means – the ambiguous alchemy of nostalgia and ambition that I now find myself in.
Insects cannot know love
Cast urethane, hair, wood, urethane foam, neon lights, steel
2 030 x 815 x 1 500 mm
2010
The Revel Fox
HD video
10 minutes (approx.)
Colour, stereo, 25 fps, PAL
2004 (unmade)
This project constituted the filmic re-presentation of a live action - an attempt to dismantle the autonomy and temporality of a staged event by mediating the primary experience of the performance through video and sound recording. The planned, formal construction of the video consisted of one static medium length foundation shot throughout with the progressive linear narrative conditional to the reassembly of a laundry drying rack. The video would have been silent except for any dialogue between Revel Fox and his assistant.
The Revel Fox planned to feature the imposition of a standard laundry drying rack into a neutral white cube gallery space. The drying rack was conceptually framed according to function and design – the former is obvious while the latter was defined as a pseudo-Modernist sculptural idiom in the vein of Fuller’s geodesic domes; Brancusi’s Endless Column; Duchamp’s readymades or Sol LeWitt’s form of Minimalism. Yet to define function purely as an obvious domestic object belies the rack’s complicated construction - the process of reassembly would have been taxing and to some extents a structural puzzle. Hence the proposed need for an assistant with cable ties.
The employment of cable-ties to secure the structure during the reassembly would have rendered the collapsible feature of the original design void. The utilitarian domestic object would have been ‘fixed’ by a renowned architect – as Warhol produced the office building as art object, my intention was a similar ‘treatment’ of the drying rack – but rather than film the laundry rack for eight hours, I instead planned to record the approximately ten minutes it might have taken for a renowned architect to reassemble it. An act that despite the film's title would have refigured the domestic contrivance, and not the architect, as art-object. This ridiculous application of over-qualification intended to refigure the architect simply as a reassembly technician to critically access the relative positions and merits of prominent, singular creative producers - particularly within the uniquely uncritical architectural discipline. In the context of the white cube gallery space and in the presence of the mechanics of video and sound recording, the actions and intentions of Revel Fox would have been serious. However my framing of that recording would not have been - The Revel Fox was planned as a conceptually motivated trap that would produce a readymade.
Revel Fox died on 13th December 2004, aged 80 years old.