A short story about found objects.
I’ve been tracking the refurb. I surface from the underpass at Byker Link en route to the studio. I cross the car park. Today, the refurb is in full swing. A cherry picker, a walk-in skip, contractors, palette trucks loaded with new furniture, hi-vis. The empty advertising lightbox is still in place.
The empty advertising lightbox is a large rectangle. It has a thick black frame and a large white body. It no longer lights up and it is covered in graffiti. Its white surface is cracked and condensation is building under the screen. It is almost sexy, it has a gritty non-chalance. It makes me want it.
I fantasise that one day I will approach the back of the bingo hall and it will be gone. Or, better still, I might get to witness it being taken down. Maybe I will find it discarded in the empty walk-in skip, the one that has been plonked in the centre of the car park now for weeks. A few days ago, it was stacked with red and blue bingo seat cushions, that kind of thick, woven pile fabric that dirt clings to, like bus seats or old carpet. Today, the skip collects debris.
I have become obsessed with the empty advertising lightbox. I return to it compulsively, as I do the underpass at the Coast Road. The underpass at the Coast Road houses a graffiti inscription that reads ‘here today’. I return to ‘here today’ hoping to witness it being painted over, becoming ‘gone tomorrow’. ‘Here today’ is accompanied by an arrow pointing down, as if staking a claim on this plot of ground amidst a warren of reinforced concrete. As if something happened here, today, as if referring to the fact that things happen all the time. But without monuments we often never know. I remember reading about Stone Tape Theory, the idea that emotional or traumatic energy from past events can be recorded into physical surroundings, absorbed by stone, rock or brick, one day to be replayed as apparitions or sound. Stone Tape Theory suggests we just don’t yet have the right technology to translate these recordings. I imagine the walls of the underpass at the Coast Road are latent with this energy; this graffiti plaque, all setup, no punchline, a testament to that.
The next day, the cherry picker removes old vinyl from the bingo hall windows. I stop to take a photo. The workman sees me. I think they all see me, hanging round the back of the hall, inspecting the empty advertising lightbox, examining refuse in the walk-in skip.
A few weeks back, I photograph a palette truck stacked with scraps of bright bingo hall carpet waiting to be disposed of at the door of the walk-in skip. Old and filthy, the carpet is patterned with repeating constellations of navy and pink. I take another photograph and the torso of a man appears from out of the skip. I capture him mid-haul, his arms outstretched, dragging the patterned scraps towards him. I later send these sequent photographs off to be turned into a lenticular print. One ghost image laid over the other to make a moving picture. From one angle he’s there, from the other he’s gone. The distributor mixes up my order and I receive a print of a couple I’ve never met before kissing.
I fall in love with objects all the time. I love things that exist out in the open, things that are worn down by use, with folklore matted into their materiality. Like all the dirt, sweat, dead skin, residue. Objects with associative qualities. Pervasive doxa. The romance of acid etch prose on bus windows or the blinking LEDs of the advertising screen across the bridge. I dream about the cracked reflective film on the Morrison’s window. I wish I could take those panes of glass from their frames. I hang around skips and construction sites. I email Nexus to see if they have any old bus stop parts to spare. I say “specifically the Perspex or the timetable frames”. I hear nothing back. I thieve pedestrian barriers and lust after convex security mirrors and long for tactile paving. I love these things because of the collective experiences they engender.
The Head of Culture at the Council is scared of me. The details aren’t important but he owes me. So I corner him at a meeting and ask if he can put me in touch with anyone who can get me access to disused municipal paving. I say “like the old Northumberland Street flags”. For months, I’ve watched as they excavate the high street, big chunks of chewing gum speckled stone in piles behind heras fencing. And for months, I’ve been trying to get through to someone, anyone, who works in one of the city depots. Surely there must be waste to be salvaged. Each time I call, I am bounced between different departments and automated robots. Before long, they stop taking my calls.
With the help of the Head of Culture, I bypass the usual bureaucracy and receive a direct line to Chris at the Newington Depot. The depot is a graveyard of retired street furniture, construction waste and maintenance infrastructure. Chris signs me in and hands me a hi-vis tabard. It smells like feet. We walk across the depot concourse. He holds his hand up to halt a moving vehicle. We pass through a set of locked gates. At the back of the depot, there are piles of neatly stacked flagstones. He tells me they’re soon to be sent to landfill, the council have to pay for that so I’m doing them a favour. I tell him I’ve walked past these piles of neatly stacked flagstones almost everyday on the other side of the fence. I tell him the more worn the better. I like the ones caked in gum. My heart swells. I bump into the Head of Culture a few months later – on freshly laid Northumberland Street, of all places – and thank him for brokering me a way in. I invite him to my show where the flags have been relocated and grouted with glitter.
It is night time and I speed-walk the bridge between the two LED advertising screens. I feel alive. I am propelled towards the Buzz Bingo car park. On my way, everything glistens. Everything shines. The palimpsest of graffiti near the studio reads anew, revealing hidden meanings, pregnant with sentiment. A dented pedestrian barrier I’ve never seen before contorts itself, flirting. A vehicle must’ve collided with it recently; its disfigurement a registration of that. The petrol station’s ageing fluorescent glare pollutes the night sky bordering it. It oozes romance. I am metabolising the city, internalising it. Owning it all feels possible. Why do I yearn to take pieces of it? Why do I want to make it all mine? If it is the collective experiences of these objects I am in love with then why do I seek to privatise them? Why do I long to dismantle the empty advertising lightbox from the back of the bingo hall?
I arrive at the back of the Buzz Bingo car park where I find the empty advertising lightbox. I go close, I put my hands either side of its frame. I pull lightly, it does not move. I peer at its sides. I then trace my finger across its cracked white body. I am careful not to cut myself. I tap at a discoloured area where water is building up. I realise I’ve never come this close to the thing I love so much before. I’ve only observed it at a distance. And only in the daytime. I am overcome with anxiety and I walk home.
We walk up the hill on the narrow pavement. I’ve seen the same structure poking out from a bush in someone’s front yard for a while now. It registers as a background thought, a low subconscious hum. I know what it is, but it hasn’t fully clicked yet. Concurrently, I’ve been pouring over gallery seating for a show. I finally realise as we’re walking that it is in fact a bus stop bench, lying face down, legs in the air. An elongated white fibreglass shell curves across extruded aluminium. It is slowly decaying. I try for weeks to reach the person inside the house. I knock twice a day until finally, an old woman answers. She is suspicious but she wants the bench gone. It’s been fly tipped. I know the bus stop from where it’s been taken, just a few hundred metres down the road. That bus stop once had an advert for super quick teabags pasted across it. I remember thinking, who asked to speed up the time it takes to make a cup of tea? As we recover the bench from her front garden, stagnant rainwater pours out from its hollow legs onto your trainers as we turn it upright. I wonder if we’re now liable for its robbery.
The moquette fabric seats are salvaged from a retired bus at the scrap yard just north of the city, where the man tells me it’s not worth his while to dismantle the buses for the parts I’ve requested so I can come and do it for myself. I weld legs so the seats can stand for a short exhibition. At the music venue where they’re on long-term loan, someone is caught being wanked off on them. They are kicked out and asked not to return. I imagine all the cum these seats have absorbed throughout their long public life.
The fossilised chewing gum on the seat’s underside asserts something similar to the Stone Tape Theory of ‘here today’ with its downwards arrow ordaining the site. Chewing gum is a persistent reminder of the filth and dirt that decorates public space. Chewing gum, spit, other people’s mouths, are licked across almost every public surface, but until we see that lump of gum, we are perhaps able to forget its pervasiveness. ‘Here today’ and chewing gum affirm the ubiquity of the things happening all the time in public space, even when we don’t want to acknowledge them. They attest to what is out of sight; they insist on what is often obscured. I attempt to conjure the mouth that masticated the rubbery blob, as I conjure the many handjobs witnessed by the bus seats I dismantle at the scrap yard, just north of the city.
The empty advertising lightbox is still there. But the walk-in skip is no longer stationed in the middle of the car park. The cherry picker has gone. The construction workers in their hi-vis have departed. The lenticular fabricator mixes up my order again, cropping the leaning torso out of the print. The carpet scraps stack and un-stack as if by magic. The refurb appears to be complete.