Radford and the Creeping Wild

Cover article, Art New Zealand. 2008/2009. Summer Issue. Number 129.

Sculptor John Radford is interested in architecture as an attempt,

but ultimately a failure, to replace organic chaos with mechanic order.

The Id…the dark, inaccessible part of our personality…we call [it] a chaos,
a cauldron full of seething excitations...
It is filled with energy reaching it from the instincts, but it has no organization,
produces no collective will, but only a striving to bring about the satisfaction of the instinctual

(Sigmund Freud, 1933).

In Western Thought, Culture and Nature are traditionally opposed: Superego vs. Id, Apollo vs. Dionysus, the Civilised vs. the Primitive; humans are tugged to either side, suppressing our Natural instincts to fit into Cultural order, while our instincts clamour to satisfy our primal drives

Our cities and their systems are designed to keep Nature at bay: concrete, metal, glass and plastic form a protective, orderly layer over Nature. Cities represent a triumph of Culture over Nature, but victory is temporary. Nature fights back: grass grows in gutters, moss on bricks, fungi in dark damp corners; bacteria everywhere (including our bodies). We have to keep wiping it off, cleaning it way. If we dropped our antisepticising vigilance, we would soon be overcome by the creeping wild, a groundswell of ‘dirt’ rising from the earth and taking the city, and us with it, back to chaos and base, filthy Nature (savagery).

Nature’s omnipresence is something John Radford was aware of from early on.  He spent much of his childhood at his grandparent’s vineyard, where he enjoyed the sense of “living decay” in an environment encrusted with rust, black mould, wine splashes and stains. “It was full of living textures and surfaces”, he says; “A winery is all about bacteria and fermentation; it’s a chemical bacterial living thing”. These stains are traces of human activity. They are both organic and human: they represent the natural in the human; that which Culture seeks to repress.

In the city, we wake up every day to find all traces of humanity’s natural filth-creating propensity have been chemically erased overnight, as if they were never there, Radford observes. All the streets and buildings are returned to order. In our triumph over Nature, we want every building painted and clean, no matter whether it is 5 years old or 100 years old. Like women’s faces, our cities are plastered over so their decay (Nature’s ultimate triumph) is kept at bay, or at least out of sight and out of conscious mind. Shabby, dirty, not “done up” areas of the city are shameful. They reveal the organic groundswell that always threatens to erupt from underneath our thin crust of civilisation, behind the city’s make-up, threatening our sense of security and of victory over the natural world

When he moved into central Auckland at eighteen, Radford went in search of the organic in and under the city. He climbed up fire escapes and onto roofs, seeking out the backs of buildings and places that are not normally seen. “I experienced the city as a tree”, he says; “a giant thing to explore”. What he found was a city that was “eating itself”. It was the 1980s, and whole blocks of historic buildings were being demolished and replaced with what Radford calls “very low grade modernist structures”; “soulless” glass towers built quickly and cheaply, with little regard for aesthetics. At the time, Radford felt like he was the only one who recognised the value of the buildings being knocked down. He would break into condemned buildings and take photographs to record them for posterity. He started making plaster models of historic facades at this time, often depicting them in states of attack: broken into pieces and mounted onto canvas, wrapped in barbed wire, and violently slashed.  

It was inside these condemned buildings that Radford first began to notice “a feeling; a vibe, that occurs in really old structures. I can’t describe it beyond that but I imagine that it’s from all the living that’s happened in that structure. I went through rolls and rolls of film trying to capture that feeling.” 

Historic buildings are receptacles of lived history; fingerprints, smears, worn hollows in stairs, the mottled darkness of built up grime around doorways where people haven’t used the handles how they are supposed to. Grime and other traces of human presence carry that human presence through time. These traces are powerful vehicles of what Walter Benjamin calls ‘aura’; the associations that cluster around an object as it is perceived. 

Historic buildings are highly auratic, because they carry visible traces of their makers.  A Century ago, bricks were made and stacked by hand. Each brick is slightly different, and sits at a minutely dissimilar angle, creating swells and hollows in the walls. Cement plaster was trowelled by hand. A slight wobble is inevitable in the decorative pilasters and sills of neoclassical facades. 

Radford feels that, conversely, much contemporary architecture works to erase aura by eliminating any trace of direct human involvement and error. This is partly the result of technology: “I’m sure they wanted to make geometrically perfect buildings back then, but they didn’t have the technology. Now we do.” “What saddens me is that the human presence, the history of human habitation, is being cleansed out of the city”, he says. 

Radford’s early monumental sculptures recreate auratic historic buildings that were demolished in the 1980s building boom. For instance, three corners of old buildings (entitled DOO, E&F and VIC) emerge from, or sink into, the ground in TIP (1998) in Ponsonby’s Western Park. The works represent the city’s failed efforts to repress its organic decay, and its guilty conscience about the destruction of its past. “I designed the sculptures to look like they are bobbing up out of a still pond, like something embarrassing that someone has tried to hide”, Radford says.  “The works have an authentic [auratic] patina of filth…it’s an old wrinkly person with the patina of age”. 

The title word, TIP, refers to ‘the tip of the iceberg’. The emerging form of the sculptures suggests the buildings’ bulk is underground; buried in the city’s subconscious; its underbelly.  The underground buildings represent the organic writhing of the unconscious: “I wanted it to seem like [the buildings] had…reassembled themselves, like the pieces had come back together under the soil”, Radford says. 

‘TIP’ also refers to ‘rubbish dump’: “Things get knocked down and swept away, and get dumped in nameless landfills”, says Radford, who sees this process as creating an archaeology of layered traces of human activity, like geological strata. Radford likes the idea that TIP adds to these layers of human/organic sediment. 

The notion that human activity deposits archaeological strata is echoed in Radford’s Transplastic works, which involve creating a layer of sediment over things, but a layer that dries and cracks and falls apart over time. Transplasticism is both a Radford-neologism and a unique process he has invented. Transplasticisms are clay-covered objects. Radford has done eight cars, a bus, a motorbike, a Vespa, a three-storey building, and Wellington’s bucket fountain so far. He started in 2003 with vintage cars, which he parked around the city for the Auckland Arts Festival. To Transplasticise is “to transform the appearance of an object with a hand-applied covering which changes in plasticity”. Transplasticisms are covered in fingerprints: clear traces of human involvement. The intention is to create the uncanny illusion that this is a solid handmade object or a “ghost from the past”, and then gradually remove that illusion over time as the clay dries and falls off over a few days. Transplasticism acknowledges the passing of time and its organic disassembling force in direct opposition to the repressive image of static durability and antiseptic newness that the city cultivates.

The Transplasticisms counter the deathly cleansing impulses of the contemporary city, introducing the wild and organic in the form of clay, which is also earth and dirt. Before paving spread through Auckland, clay was the scourge of the city, Radford says; “the streets used to be churned up by wheels, creating a clay quagmire”. Clay is not wanted on city streets; it has been suppressed, like other kinds of dirt. A clay car is therefore deeply ironic, and also unexpected. 

Because they are unusual items that appear in a familiar context, Transplasticisms also introduce the wild, unregimented and organic in a psychological sense. Radford describes people’s reaction to the clay-covered objects: “people see this thing and it is like a surreal apparition; they do a double take, and then they investigate further, poking their fingers into the clay, like a toddler who sees a frog for the first time”. “It’s a primal investigation; it involves a primal part of the brain”, he says. “Some people make protrusions. One man pulled a piece of clay off [a car] and built a floppy aerial.” 

The performance piece This Other City (2007) seems similarly designed to create the effect of uncanny surprise. A ‘surveyor’ enters the city, but is unable to see it. S/he sets about making a new city on the site, making notes, taking measurements, and installing the new city’s substructure (in the form of cardboard pipes, cogs, taps, fire hydrants, a phone box, etc). 

This Other City is about blindness to Nature and our tendency to suppress natural functions to the point of ridiculousness. It recalls early surveyors, who were unable to ‘see’ New Zealand’s wild, bush-clad mountainousness when they first arrived in the 1840s, and instead saw a mild pastoral land ready to be civilised with geometric cities. The work, with its naked pipes and cogs, is also a comment on the city’s denial of its natural functions; the guts at its foundations, which are hidden to maintain the city’s illusion of victory over Nature – its cultural aestheticism.

The Sound of Rain (2007) is a small bronze bay villa on a scale ¼ acre section that sits on a comparatively large field in Potter’s Park on Dominion Road. At 110mm high, the house is so small that, looking down on it, it seems like you are on Mount Eden looking down on real villas. When you squat and look down at the bronze section, you see layers of words: words that describe what would have been on a section like this in the early 1900s: ‘Lemon Tree’, ‘Vege Garden’, ‘Washing Line’; words that describe current uses: ‘Carport’, ‘Subdivision’; and words that describe the land before it became a ¼ acre section: ‘Path to Kaimoana’ (suggesting this was once part of a path that Maori used to get food from the sea). These are layers, or sediments, of history.

The small size of the house in The Sound of Rain suggests that the villa is not singular, but part of a collective.  Radford describes a photograph taken from Mt Eden in the late 1800s. The city up to Mt Eden is full of villas, but behind Mt Eden the houses drop right off; there are only twenty between Mt Eden and Waitakere. “The houses are tiny and in the middle of nowhere”, Radford observes; “They seem pathetic; a tiny thing that it seems you could just stand on. But look what it’s part of – this thronging city. It’s like a bacteria.” 

In Thanks a Lot Icarus (2007, Whitespace) Radford exhibited a series of small wax houses with strata layers of different substances cast into them: coal dust, gold dust, kauri gum dust; kauri sawdust, Bakelite powder. The various dusts suspended in the wax houses represent traces of trade, commerce and industry at the time villas were built. The houses look like ice and are intended to resemble Antarctic core samples. Like ice cores, “they record what was going on at the time they were built”. The layers are like strata in rock, recording history by registering its effects.

The same exhibition also featured bronze villas in various state of slump. Radford says these villas are experiencing “an organic relaxing”.  Radford had slumped traditional forms of architecture before: DOO (1998), one of the TIP sculptures, has its chimney slumping over, “like it’s made of gelatine”. This first instance of slumping was Radford’s response to the challenge of reproducing “all the details and geometry” of the three facades in TIP. “I was thinking ‘what if it could just relax? I wanted to pull the rigid spines out of the building and watch it slump.” This playful act is another way to bring the unstructured and organic back into the structured and sanitised city. The slumped villas, and DOO’s chimney, behave like relaxed flesh: a spent erection. 

Some forms in neoclassical architecture (of which villas an example) are quite organic: “a baluster has a fat belly, a curve like a woman’s breast; it’s heavier at the bottom – it has a wonderful fleshy slump.”  But these small organic details are usually subsumed to an overall order and constraint, which reflect the conservatism of the time: “when bay villas were first built, the rooms for women were at the back of the house, with small windows, while the front of the house was for nothing but bullshit and boast”. Radford shifts the balance slightly, from order to chaos: from Culture to Nature. 

Radford’s latest work, Lux Flux (2008), is a series of 200 small light sources wired to a neoclassical façade in the Britomart precinct in Auckland’s CBD. When triggered by passers-by, the lights flash wildly in a random sequence; Nature’s chaos laid over the façade’s rigid, but beautiful and humanly flawed texture. The light is a layer placed over the building; subverting it, but loving and using it, too: keeping it live. Radford says he wanted to make the façade bend and flex.

The city’s order is our order. Cities reflect our constant internal battle to repress our destructive, chaotic natural instincts. Sometimes the city is too successful, taking us too far from Nature’s chaos, which is creative, liberating and exciting. Radford is a counterforce to this overwhelming restraint and propriety. He celebrates and highlights imperfections, age and irregularities because they add depth, meaning and humanity to our cities and selves.

By Amanda Wayeirs