Scale and Illusion with Alex Chinneck
You probably wouldn’t believe that a building could melt, be built upside down, or be split into two with its top half somehow levitating. An electricity pylon couldn’t just fall from the sky, and 312 windows could never be identically smashed. The thing is, they can, and have. They’ve been brought to life by London-based artist Alex Chinneck.
Chinneck’s work is renowned for its ambitious scale and illusory nature. They are largely cross-disciplinary and cross-technical – architectural processes intertwining with sculptural processes, and engineering with art. The results are nothing short from magnificent. His piece From the Knees of my Nose to the Belly of my Toes, or the ‘sliding house’, as it’s more commonly known, saw the façade of a home in Margate replaced with a brick front. It gave the impression that it was somehow sliding into the front garden. The detached four-storey house had been derelict for 11 years, had fallen into ruin, and Chinneck’s project was a kind of cultural or artistic rejuvenation not only of the building, but the area itself. The piece was followed on from his study A Pound of Flesh for 50p, a metre high brick wall made from dyed paraffin wax to resemble a proper brick, which then, gradually melted throughout the day.
His work is always a contextual response to its area, fitting into the aesthetic language of its surroundings, but always a little different, always astonishing, and always blending reality with something more surreal. Telling the Truth through False Teeth or the identically smashed windows of an abandoned livery factory where the same pattern was replicated on 312 glass panels. Take My Lightning Bolt but don’t Steal my Thunder involved replicating a section of Convent Garden which was then constructed to look as though the upper portion had broken off from its base, hovering in mid-air. It was an astounding feat, much like piece Pick Yourself up and Pull Yourself Together, a section of tarmac peeled back from the road, or A Bullet from a Shooting Star, a 35 metre tall latticed steel structure resembling an electricity pylon that had miraculously shot into the earth.
A graduate of Chelsea College of Art, and a board member of the Royal British Society of Sculptors, Chinneck’s works are always full of sculptural considerations. He says that he is currently working on 15 projects all at different stages, 4 or 5 very large works with councils, and one architectural project of which he is particularly excited about. He’s very keen to move into an architecture studio now. It’s a slightly different approach, he explained.
This ‘slightly different’ approach is what we discussed with Chinneck early one morning, as he shared more about his fascinating work, thinking, and vision.
fluoro. What are you working on and when can we expect it to launch?
Alex Chinneck. The projects that we develop and we’re involved in are so complex, I suppose obviously structurally, and also in terms of obtaining the necessary finance and the kind of administrational consent to produce these things because they’re so large. At the moment we’ve got about 4 or 5 projects with different councils, so what that means is that (and when I say ‘these 4’ they’re big projects) that we’ve been invited to develop a project for a client and we developed the concept, the client likes the concept and approves the concept and supports the concept, in every way I suppose. And now the council has to approve them and give planning consent, but just their consent to the arrival of this large artwork in their borough or their region that is quite a stressful time for us actually.
It feels a little like make or break because this council could say yes or no.
The issue we have, and I think this is a global issue, is that the funding in the arts in the UK has been cut enormously. In most boroughs there used to be arts offices and there used to be funding for arts within each borough and within each council. But cuts across the UK have meant that there’s very little funding in the arts anymore. And so increasingly people rely on and turn to and look to private companies and developers etc, to finance the projects. The councils always take the stance that they want culture in the borough, and they’ll do anything can to support culture in their borough and facilitate relationships between artists, cultural practices and the people who are capable of financing them as people turn to companies. However, it seems that not only now do they not support them financially, but also they’re now putting up administrational obstacles to these things. It’s crazy that these developers come on these companies and offer to invest huge amounts of cultural activity in their region. The councils still have a problem with it and try and create hurdles. So it’s a bit stressful. Public art is becoming really complicated process and practice now.
f. How is this affecting you directly? Is it getting harder?
AC. It’s getting easier for me as time goes on, but I can’t speak because the thing is that artists develop a reputation and then they slowly develop the momentum and then people and awareness brings opportunities. This is why I always like media activity because firstly I create works to be seen and enjoyed and I love the idea that an artwork that is made in London, somebody five minutes later can be enjoying it on the other side of the world.
Simultaneously, awareness does increase opportunity and we’re lucky enough to be invited and commissioned projects quite regularly now, but also, at the same time, I know that there’s lots of other young artists and there’s far more artists than there are opportunities. Constant cuts to finance, funding and support does make people’s half into the art world and half into a successful artistic career increasingly difficult. But in saying that, you have to carve your own path and you have to create your own opportunities.
Two projects that I celebrated in my career were firstly the identically smashed windows where we had 312 identically smashed and cracked windows. With that particular project I convinced the person who owned the building to give us the building to use and let us do this project. Then I wrote to glass companies and one of the glass companies gave us glass for free and then we cut it all ourselves. We realised that project for nothing, and then with that philosophy in mind and with an increased sense of ambition, we applied the same models to the sliding house in Margate where we split the front of the house and we got every single material given for free including all the building services, engineering services, and professional services. So we realised a £100,000 project for nothing. That’s what I mean … you’ve just got to somehow almost facilitate your own opportunities I think.
f. How does sculpture and architecture work together in your mind?
AC. Well, not particularly well. Certainly politically not particularly well. The way I see it is, the buildings offer lots of different things, but for me I’m most excited about this idea of material manipulation and that’s what my art is a combination of. It’s a creative thought and then fused with structural complexity. And I suppose I would apply the same model to an architectural process, and we are. The method continues in that we’re trying to do things with materials and structure that aren’t really seemingly possible or supposedly done. My work explores architecture, uses construction, and involves complex engineering and is about pushing materials and processes into hopefully visually stimulating territory. Those considerations can still be applied to an architectural situation, and that’s what we’re doing. I just need a lot help with boring stuff because architectural projects are full of regulations, I need help navigating that.
f. Where did this fascination with art, design, sculpture, illusion, architecture, come from and how does it come to fruition?
AC. It came gradually and what felt accidental.
At art school I just got bored of making art and talking about art. I’ve just felt that with art there’s this formula – there’s a formula in terms of how you go through the educational system, and as you do this foundation, then complete a degree, a masters, and then you leave that, you get an art studio, and then you have to find a gallery. It’s just this formula and I also felt that it was the same way about discussing art and producing art.
It was this determination to move the work outside of a gallery context. I don’t have a problem with gallery contexts, I just have a problem with this kind of treadmill of thought where the evolution of an artist’s career seems so set-out before them and so obvious. I wanted to make something that had never been made before. I was a painter, but I just ran out of things to paint, so I just felt like I couldn’t paint anything that someone else had already painted, or extraordinarily similar to.
I started to realise that I was interested in more than one discipline. It wasn’t just about making art. I was equally interested in architecture, design, and engineering. At art school I just started to work, I started to develop this process of collaboration – cross-disciplinary collaboration – I could never work with another artist, but cross-disciplinary and cross-technical collaboration was where I started working with different universities outside of my art school. I would go to Imperial College in South Kensington, which is a technical college and it’s more for the sciences, and started working with this club there who were involved with robotics, and we started making kinetic sculptures. They would introduce me to different things like new possibilities and apparatuses that they had. We would construct very cheaply, and I would design an experience around it and consider how that might be introduced as a cosmetic package.
When I left art school, I started to visit factories. I’ve always been excited by industry. Construction and engineering are not only perfect companions, but also they’re fantastic facilitators of sculptural practice, as they present the materials and processes, possibilities, experience, knowledge to advance sculptural practice, and make ambition achievable. I realised this and started to visit lots and lots of companies across the UK, manufacturers of all types of materials and I started to develop relationships with them. I also started to realise that they have resources – the reality is that they have material, the processes, the finances, and they have the marketing departments. But they were quite often starved of particular projects that gave them marketing materials. So I started to team up with them and started to make smaller sculptures using their materials and processes that they’d paid for. And it kind of evolved from there.
Also this was the most exciting thing; that the development and the possibilities attached with sculptural practice, ran parallel with new possibilities in engineering, manufacturing, construction, technology… so sculptural practice can evolve in the same way that architectural developments can because new materials and new processes bring new sculptural possibilities. Whereas other disciplines just felt too limited to the human. There was not enough pressure to do think outside the box. It’s like box-ticking, and the boxes get harder to tick especially if the art wasn’t in a competitive place. But you’re still ticking boxes. Public art is great and it has an incredibly responsibility and an incredibly opportunity to have global reach and millions and millions of people to see and enjoy it. And that’s quite an exciting thing. And for a long time public art was in such a shit place, for so long public art was just awful. It was purely for decoration and I liked the idea of moving public art into a more dynamic place.
f. How do you want viewers, whether physically present or online, to react to your work?
AC. Each to their own I suppose. I think ultimately I’m looking to astound people. I’m just trying to do things that people believe weren’t possible.
I hope that they’re sculpturally astounding, I hope that they defy the realms of possibility in astonishing ways, and I think ambition is the most important thing that somebody can possess. When you present people with something of utter ambition, it can have a positive impact on them. Ultimately I am trying to create positive experiences, they can be playful and they are surreal, and they have a huge amount accessibility for those two reasons. Anyone can see and understand and enjoy them. That’s important to me.
I hope they’re uplifting, in their ambition and in their ability to make the everyday world extraordinary so they can make people feel slightly more optimistic about things.
f. Why have you chosen to use everyday elements in your work?
AC. I use everyday elements because they’re part of a recipe for accessibility; creating experience in the public realm that the public can relate to. I think that there’s something very exciting about blending fantasy with familiarity. When you do that, and when you do it right, you can really capture people’s imagination. If it’s too much of ‘what can’, it loses a certain magic. There’s magic and fantasy, and there’s reality and familiarity. And when you blend the two something kind of uplifting and optimistic happens. But I also think that’s art. I think the best art presents the world around us in a new way. Sculpture is very much the rearrangement and reconfiguration of the material world. That’s what I do really, I take the material and physical world and distort it somewhat. I think that’s really what sculpture is. Because the activity is outside and in public … for something to be powerful it almost needs to be believable. By using the everyday materials, structures, objects, and buildings, it heightens the believability of the artwork and I think the ultimately the impact. It’s about developing a contextual response: everything that we produce it’s contextually responsive. If informed by the surroundings, and the visual language of the area, the work has the ability to join it rather than dominate it, and that’s always an important consideration when making projects of this scale. I’ve ended up making very large, very ambitious projects and they’re getting bigger, unfortunately. It’s hard. It’s not like a growing size doesn’t present an evolution in quality but its kind of great that we’re doing it. We’re working on one at the moment that is 40 metres tall by 50 metres wide, and it’s just big…
—
Chinneck is certainly not laying low. The mere mention of that leads him to describe his anxiety attack a few weeks ago thinking that he was laying low. But he promises he is more ambitious than ever. The projects that he has on the go are running simultaneously, all due to launch in about the same week, not to mention the collection that are vying for council approval. We’ll keep you updated on the ambitious, surreal and illusory works of Alex Chinneck.
—
