Passed Over: Suck & Blow

Thankfully the future cannot accommodate everything. How could it? It's simply not that hungry, for if it could absorb all our plans, prospects, directions, visions and proposals it would surely be an obscene dimension? An obese carnival of ends where every half-measured, half-considered idea wriggled its way into existence. And yet, quite generously - like the cow - the future does seem to have multiple stomachs. It does permit us to return to that which has been passed over, forgotten or rejected: we can re-submit what was once denied by the future's embrace, yet it must necessarily face a different kind of digestion. And the process begins again.

This package of proposals was sent to (the now deceased) Black&Blue Gallery. The strategy should be explained. We thought that by starting from the most ostentatious point - working our way down through the unreasonable - we might find a happy balance between that which is absolutely impossible and that which is just mildly so.

As everywhere-man Kant reminds us: "Whether the field of possibility be larger than the field which contains everything which is actual, and whether this again be larger than the field of what is necessary - these are curious questions the solution of which is synthetic, and yet they are to be brought before the tribunal of reason alone."

Suck

We will cut a hole in the gallery windows through which we will feed a large vacuum tube. This tube will lead outside and across Cleveland Street to the roof of one of the buildings that sits parallel to the gallery.

The world crashes in

On the roof we will construct a massive apparatus that will work on the same principle as the Dyson vacuum cleaner. Anybody, and we mean any body that steps into the gallery – contemporary art fans, tradesmen, cats, dogs and skateboarders – will be torn from their feet as the snaking vacuum tube consumes everything it encounters. From the street pedestrians will be startled as an erratic procession of blurry faces and artificially inexpensive denim screams above their heads.

All that is solid melts into air

Once they have been wrenched through the tube these hapless men and women will be tossed around like leaves in an updraft. Teaching them the lesson that we all come to learn eventually - solid ground is a luxury, and a privilege. Our giant vacuum cleaner will proclaim that this entitlement can no longer be squandered on the timid and indifferent.

Simply put, if you can't stand for something then you don't deserve to stand. But of course, being fully conscious of health and safety standards, will take every care to ensure the safety of these hoovered subjects. At the end of their journey through the tube they will be stored safely in a large plastic repository; where they will remain whirling around helplessly until one of their loved ones shows up to pluck them from the device like the candied fingers of a lottery hostess picking the forever losing numbers.

Not to worry

A small first aid kit and packet of ice will be available to treat any injuries.

Making literal the strife of being together – the turbulent and vertiginous experience to any collectivity – 'Suck' will test the limits of those all too-often cosy occurrences of 'coming together for the sake of art'. This vacuum will not be vacuous. Rather, the transportation from an expected-interior to an unexpected-exterior might suggest that within the spins and flatulence of individual pursuits and solipsistic tendencies, the world is necessarily complicated and necessarily shared. You cannot fall out of this world, but you can certainly be sucked from one context to another in the unpredictability of any predictable context.

Blow

“What is happening to my skin?
Where is the protection that I needed?
Air can hurt you too.”
- Air, Talking Heads

We aim to fill a gap in your amenities by installing high-powered ceiling fans into your gallery. Instead of operating to cool crimson cheeks and dry sweaty brows, we will intensify its burst 10,000 fold, programming them to turn on and off at random intervals. As if summoning Fujin – the Japanese god of wind – enthusiastic gallery-goers will be quite literally grounded as their body is crumpled by the immense force of your new facility.

Pressed to the ground by the rush of air, the experience is both an imposition and an event (dramatizing that same delight that is felt when one places ones hand out of a moving car to feel that surprising resistance). The same surprise will function here in excess: suddenly stuck in the downdraft, the visitors are placed in a peculiar togetherness engendered by fan-forced exertion. Reduced to subjects under the sovereign fans, the work will offer an assortment of portraits as each visitor reacts differently to the perplexing force being asserted on them.

Air-bound to their context, agency and identity are put into question: the question being do you settle into ‘the blow’ and attempt to find illusionary comfort? Do you enjoy submitting to the dominating pressure? Or, do you try to worm your way out of the situation once you have had enough? ‘Blow’ will offer a physical realization to the weight of invisible power, and the possible actions and reactions produced under such weight.

Suck & Blow

Our proposal involves attaching an inflatable 'lung' to the windows of the gallery. From inside the gallery visitors will be able to blow air into a multitude of long ‘throats’ that will extend through the space and out the open windows; accumulating in this elastic and expandable air-bag. Collectively maintained through the banal event of living and breathing, this burgeoning air-filled annex utilizes human airflow (the interior-to-exterior fact of breathing) in order to construct a social design project that is not fascism.

Drawing the night air into pink lungs the crowds will huff and puff, their frantic activity expelling everything they've attempted to keep bottled up – frustration, boredom, conviction and vigor will pour out of them with confused gusto – a hundred blustered faces will then look on as the cancerous metalized-polyester growth swells out over the street – intimidating the cars that pass underneath with it's looming and convulsing form.

And so the architectural balloon will function as both an object-psychiatrist and an annex – accommodating the ills, discontent, and desires of the visitors, while simultaneously growing from their collective contribution.

In addition to the luminous inflatable, the space will also be (noisily) occupied by a suck and blow orchestra – a collection of invented instruments that are designed to be played by inhaling and exhaling instrumentalists. These instruments will be made from a range of ordinary materials, and will be used to produce an album thematically aligned with the exhibition. Both the album and the instruments will be available for purchase.

Halfway between teenagers siphoning petrol and a child nuzzling affectionately at their mothers tit, drinks will be offered in rubber tubes protruding from a wall, which visitors can enjoy at their own leisure. Everything is to be interpreted, even your breath, even your libation.

We feel this collection of both objects and actions – or the activation of objects through the means of audience participation – will create an intriguing and rousing narrative in your space. For us the concept hinges on utilizing a shared reality (no matter how fragile that may be) to literally offer an outlet for collective desires and complexities to accumulate. Visible for all to see (both inside and outside the gallery) this temporal installation inflates the imagination though the very reality and necessity of existence.

What are we to do with our imaginations? How long can we hold onto them before they give way, demand to be heard, or deflate? It is under these questions that we are proposing Suck & Blow – an event that recruits ideas of collection, thematic expression and unknown ends, into a visually and orally stimulating occasion.

We want our ideas to be events so that those who experience them can have their own ideas and their own events.