John Goto
Born 1949 in Stockport. He gained a BA Hons in Fine Art from the St Martins School of Art, London. Artist in residence at Kettle's Yard in 1988. He decided having read 'A Way of Life' that the house should be the subject of the project. After a month he went up to Edinburgh and recorded an interview with Jim Ede. This is the last known recorded interview with Jim - he was 93. The transcript survives.
In his interview, he describes the difficulties of working in Cambridge, although he had wonderful access to Kettle's Yard. He produced 'The Atomic Yard' as a result of the residency. The name came from a remark by Jim about the possibility of an atomic war and a record by Count Baisie entitled 'The Atomic Mr Baisie'. At the time of interview he was Professor of Fine Art at the University of Derby.
Link to transcript of interview with Jim Ede: www.johngoto.org.uk/atom-yrd/convers.htm
Interviewed: 2008-09-01By: Katie Maynard
Length: 58 mins
Media: On 2 tracks on CD with summary
Interview id: MYKY22
Kettle's Yard as a yardstick for middle class taste in the 1960s
View: Transcript Theme: House as architecture
Kettle's Yard seems to me to be somewhere that has a kind of devoted and rather reverential response from a lot of people which is great but I don't think that that should stop critical thinking and it does seem to me that that is often put on hold in Kettle's Yard because of the attractiveness of the aesthetic experience. Now, why is it attractive to us? I mean, it might not always be for people in the future but I think he created something there in the late fifties which actually became a kind of yardstick for middle class taste in the sixties and I think the kind of rustic modernism that's employed in Kettle's Yard, that's one way of terming it anyway, is something that was picked up on or was developed, maybe quite separately, by [Terence] Conran and Habitat in the sixties: so the idea of having wooden floors with rugs on them; cool aesthetics; minimal amount of artifacts but those that are there are well chosen; the bringing in of natural objects into the home environment; the lack of fussiness about it, that kind of modernist aesthetic, rather minimal that one can see in modernist architecture, he brought to the interior of these old houses; the idea of knocking through even and, I mean, everyone was knocking through by the seventies and Jim had been doing it much earlier and the extension; its whiteness; its kind of, it was a way that we all, or most of the middle classes in the sixties and seventies aspired to, that kind of look.
Direct link to audio: .mp3
