Benches

The following text is adapated from Works and Texts 1992, p. 47 et seq.

Benches began its existence with a chance meeting between myself and a postcard based on a photograph of Battersea Park. Most of the many postcard purchases that I have made have the feeling of Ezra Pound's category, 'not source material but relevant'. This one however spoke to me directly of mortality. Stark light fused the group while better delineating its members in their isolation and separateness. They were the assembled cast of a tragedy and / or its spectators: the ironic brightness of council flowers and the drab gaiety of the surrounding concrete parkland reinforced these impressions.

Much later it occurred to me why the association of benches with mortality was strong in my mind: my brother had told me (when I was about twelve) that the bench in front of Ashton's the S.E. London undertakers had been put there in order that old people might sit down to rest on it, and dying there, provide trade. It was also on a park bench on Clapham Common that I spent much of the perplexing day on which my father died.

Although the only quotation in the picture comes from the same text as the series Ein Deutsches Requiem, there was also a predictive association with Dante: it seemed to me that a picture might deal with the ten pre-purgatorial circles and I got near to planning such a picture, with material from postcards, describing the progressive abandonment of hope. One such circle is exemplified by Benches (Dante often differentiates the stages of his afterworld by the physical positions of the people in them), i.e., the stage of resignation to the fact of death.

The use of dots neither related to the true disposition of the dots in the postcard printing (although the cards were studied with a X6 magnifier) not do they follow any purist system of optical colour (unlike true pointillist paintings). They merely proceed from the decision to work in separated colour and the desire to make adjustments continually as I worked from the often coarse-grained information at my disposal.

The initial ikon of the figures on the Battersea Park bench continued to haunt me and three of its cast featured in close up as a series of cards called Come & Go after the Beckett play of that name. The group as a whole formed the central feature of a tapestry in which each of the master weavers of the Edinburgh Tapestry Company found their own solution to resolving the problem of working from elusive dots of crude offset reproduction.

See also the tapestry version of this subject in Textiles.