Building Urban Myths
Jimmy Cauty's exhibition ESTATE makes model villages out of some of Scotland's best known housing projects – raising questions about working-class housing and the mythologies it inspires.
- Interview by
- Kieran Curran
Organised by the newly instantiated collective The Society of Spectacles—comprising of curator Paul Robertson, cultural journalist Neil Cooper, Graham Domke, and Mark Reed—ESTATE at North Edinburgh Arts, Muirhouse is running until the end of the month before moving through to PLATFORM in Glasgow on June 29, the latest stop on the tour of Jimmy Cauty’s current work.
Cauty—best known as half of the KLF/K Foundation with Bill Drummond—is now focused on producing visual work. Having previously produced work exploring themes of dystopia and decay (A Riot in a Jam Jar and the Aftermath Dislocation Principle), ESTATE, produced in collaboration with L13 Light Industrial, is a scale model village of a prison-like housing complex, consisting of four concrete tower blocks each two metres high, installed within a 40-square-metre shipping container.
Tagged as a ‘municipal disaster zone’, viewers are treated to a barrage of sirens, dry ice, and the sounds of helicopters on entry, which make it a struggle to parse the full detail of Cauty’s designs through the haze. Within the blocks, slogans are daubed on interior walls—’we demand Resus’, ‘U3A fight back!’, ‘fighting for beans’—alongside imagery drawn from carceral sources (toilets in disrepair), body horror (a bath filled with blood), as well as public information posters directly lifted from current NHS public health campaigns.
The effects are immersive, and full of allusions. The Covid-19 pandemic is an inescapable reference point. Yet the location points to a certain tension between the production of art and the community in which it is set. From a certain viewpoint, the piece is a detournéd model village that mocks the arrogance inherent in urban planning; rather than presenting an ideal, it shows an unabashed and almost theatrically pitched nightmare.
Credit: Kieran CurranHowever, this ironic play on the failures of system-built public housing programmes is underscored with a sense of cynical inevitability, all while the spectre of speculative development haunts the area (and, indeed, the city of Edinburgh). This begs the question – who is it for? The people of the area, or the trailblazers of the new urban frontier? The voyeur looking at how the other half lives?
This may be uncharitable. The exhibition has, by all accounts, attracted a mix of local residents as well as a visit from students from nearby Craigroyston Secondary School, alongside KLF afficionados and art observers. Sometimes, we can merely be entertained, needing the spectacular, along with a dash of punk bromides.
Kieran Curran spoke with Jimmy Cauty to discuss elements of the exhibition.
The craft that went into the production of these blocks is remarkable, with often extensive grotesque detail. What was your process like in conceiving and decorating ESTATE?
I used construction and decorating skills developed in the 1970s in the South London squat scene. My friends and I would routinely partially destroy the interiors of Lambeth council’s Victorian housing stock, demolishing walls and sometimes whole floors in our quest to create communal living spaces, and that squat aesthetic has been carried forward and is evident in ESTATE.
The pieces and the installation itself I found very effective on an aesthetic level. The container itself is incongruously placed in the midst of a housing estate, and walking through the shipping container, you’re constrained by it, taken in by the sound, minimal lighting, dry ice, and by peering in at the rooms. Is it important for art to have that bodily, immersive effect?
I didn’t think it would be enough to just put the towers in the container on their own – I figured if you are going to invite people inside your shipping container the least you can do is bombard them with painfully high levels of sound and smoke. It seems rude not to. So yes, it’s very important the experience is totally immersive.
The location is next to North Edinburgh Arts in Muirhouse, in an area that has experienced a lot of replanning in the past few decades, from high-rise towers to low-rise apartments, and is now experiencing gentrification. How significant is the location for this work?
We like to take our model villages to places other model villages fear to go. We try to make the containers we build as rugged as possible, so they can be left to fend for themselves out in the big bad world. We would rather have ESTATE set up in a local housing estate than inside the Royal Academy (we have tried both and the former is preferable).
There’s imagery that seems lifted from 1970s hospitals, or media images thereof. Is there a critique here, connecting the era of system-built ‘Brutalist’ housing with other forms of (arguably) paternalistic institutions?
No, all the images and posters inside the towers are borrowed from current NHS and gov.uk posters and pamphlets. It’s probably the NHS design department that’s stuck in the 1970s. The TV news footage was all up to date at the time the tour started.
Throughout the piece, there seems to be traces of different forms of ‘myth’ – graffitied slogans, parody NHS posters, royal portraits adorning the flats. I also got a strong sense of the overbearing myth of high-rise itself, particularly in the UK, as a malign, failed form of urban living. It doesn’t have the same associations in mainland Europe.
Do you think there’s anything redeemable in the idea of mass high-rise housing today, given that many large cities in the West are experiencing housing crises?
Tower block living gets plenty of bad press, that’s for sure. But I would be sad to see them all demolished. Contemporary model village building is all about spreading urban myths; without the myths there would be nothing left but the architecture.
Look at traditional model villages: it’s ridiculous what they get away with in terms of spreading rural myths about Englishness and a kind of boring bucolic paradise. I’m happy to mythologise those ideas about the failed system if it makes my tower blocks look more fucked up.
Last—and a slightly incongruous—question. The installation had a peculiarly ambient effect on one of our number (a two-month old baby), and he was soothed into sleep on the walk through. Does this effectively put the work in the category of socially useful art?
That baby is my target audience: easily pleased and doesn’t ask too many awkward questions. Maybe the baby was picking up on the concept that the model village is somehow framed as socially useful art. That’s enough to send anyone off to sleep.