spiral
Placing objects and the impossibility of keeping Jim's version
Mike Tooby
Transcript
We did occasionally lend to other exhibitions of course so that would require re-thinking a space and then on the level of the none art, as it were, the pebbles, feathers - damage, loss - would require re-thinking. Sometimes we ran this past Jim, other times we just did it and told him, other times we just did it and didn't tell him. But there would be a process of debate, I think, and Jeremy had a different kind of passion to me about the need for it to be just so. We, probably like a lot of people very intimate with Kettle's Yard, we probably each had our own idea of what that meant and that's where the analogy I was meaning about the performance of the piece of music comes in. Let's take the spiral as the best example, or the dark to light pebbles. We would constantly remake that. And then the precise nuance of the relationship between that and that and that, whatever it might be, might be just slightly different. Another would be the angle of the Hamilton Finlay in the plants area. And of course the fact that the plants changed. I remember a huge schmozzle about the dizygotheca down below by the piano in the lower area and the Buddha. Because of course the dizygotheca covered the Buddha and the Buddha sat under the tree but eventually this thing became too big, it grows, you know, plants grow! So how high this should... and Gerard Hemsworth of all people, he was in a show that I curated, and he got really interested in Kettle's Yard and he offered to find a dizygotheca of the right height. So, in other words, you might be passionate about exactly where it was, whatever it might be or what you'd got to know, but of course the irony was that it could never be exactly that.
Placing an object as an act of control
Kip Gresham
Transcript
I tend to be a quieter rather than a noisier person and so being able to go to the house and just sit was something very special and that remains true. It's busier now and it's public, but it still remains true, that it's a special place. One of the things that I wasn't aware of at the time but again I am now, was that he shared with a lot of the artists a thread of OCD, you know, the placing of things and the arranging of things and so on, is very much to do with how you control what is inside your life and outside and so if things are bad, then you line up the paperclips on the table in a row or arrange the stones in a spiral on the windowsill or whatever. I hooked into that completely and I think a lot of people do. It's very hard to recognise that we all have this kind of thread, that actually we're vulnerable and the only way we can deal with the chaos of the world is arranging the pebbles but, it's an important factor and it's something, I think, that united him with the artists and it's why he tended to recognise in some of the cooler artists, like Ben Nicholson and so on, this desire to arrange. So the pictures on the wall weren't just where they were because that was covering the damp spot or because that was where there was a gap. It's because that's where it was right.
