A View From The Ledge, Mathew Weir on William Wallace.
It is a frosty morning in January and I am walking the roughly five miles from Eye Railway Station on the East Anglian Line to the grassy and tree-lined field that my dear friend William Wallace inhabits. He has been living in the Suffolk landscape for about six years and it’s become the place he calls home, for now.
William, of Romany-Jewish heritage, has always felt the need to move on. From his past, his childhood. From the idea of remaining in one place for too long. But here at this time, this environment seems to offer something. It’s a location with roots and personal stories. It’s a return to somewhere he used to want to get away from.
As I walk I think of the last time I was in Suffolk. It was to visit the grave of the German writer and literary critic W.G. Sebald.
W.G. MAX SEBALD
18.05.1944
to
14.12.2001
Sebald was a writer who subtly weaved the horrors of war, history and destruction with ideas of remembering, misremembering and forgetting. His writings, full of both fact and fictions, are like ghost stories, haunted by the pains of our past. As his biographer Carole Angier writes, “His sense of others’ suffering … was acutely real.” And “It was not a searching for pain but an inability to avoid feeling it all around him”. Born in Wertach, Germany he settled in East Anglia, not far from where I am walking.
The air is sharp with cold and the low sun hazily casts blue shadows about, bleaching the surface of things. Walking up Blackthorn Causeway, the last stretch of my journey, my mind goes to something I had heard on the radio and written on a blue post-it note. It reads - ‘memory is both selective and fragmented’. I can’t remember who said it.
I reach my destination and am greeted by William. We enter the field via a large iron farm gate. Looking over to one corner of the acre of land I see the artwork he has called Hedging Around Our Heritage. It’s almost part of the landscape, blending in and camouflaged yet wholly present at the same time. It consists of fifteen screens, all three feet wide and eight feet high. These are joined to form a rough circle that is not apparent at first glance - to understand this you need to walk around it. Each screen has the image of trees coming up from the ground, their branches intertwining, making a forest of sorts. Different shades of greens, browns and greys appear against the light brown of the hessian screen. Getting close one can see that every tree and the ground from which they grow have been lovingly and painstakingly hand-stitched. The trees appliquéd along the edges of the coloured fabric and the ground embroidered using strips of earthy coloured fabric, becomes a mass of textured surface. I already know this as I have seen the work in various stages, but I am still in awe every time I see the detail and labour involved. We talk about this often, how boring this kind of work can be, but how the rhythm of a repetitive, laborious activity is also settling.
Moving around the work you come to the most beautiful and alarming doors, creating an arch and a way into the structure. Facing opposite each other and hand carved into their wooden surface are two life-size skeletal figures. They are on their knees and praying with their hands together, their heads subtly tilted back. The motif is taken from William Cheselden, Osteographia, or The Anatomy of the Bones (London, 1733). An English surgeon, Cheselden’s book of anatomical illustrations set out to accurately depict ‘every bone in the human body’ and even implemented a Camera Obscura to assist. In William’s version, they have been given what looks like angel wings, patterned in a diamond-like patchwork of orange and yellow. The wings arch back over the skeleton’s heads. Wings to fly away, to move on and escape a horror?
With the doors open you can look inside. The backs of the hessian panels are covered with mirrored stainless steel and the floor is full of skeletons carved into the wooden surface, made up of large sections as if a jigsaw puzzle. These figures are the same scale as the skeletons on the doors but without the wings and these ones are twisted and contorted, intermingled but not touching. There are twenty-two of them lying on their side, but the mirrored surface repeats them infinitely and gives no end to the destruction and massacre seen. We also view ourselves reflected, the living amongst the dead. But the mirrors, due to the nature of their material, also distort. It brings to mind something of the funfair ‘Hall of Mirrors’. But rather than offering an apparently humorous sight of ourselves and surroundings the mirrors here corrupt the self-image, mutate and disfigure it. This hints at the destruction of the human form by war. In one reflection my body is in two, in another it’s sliced and in bits. It looks archaeological - the unearthing of a mass grave. I notice a subtle detail that deviates from Cheselden‘s original skeleton. The feet have become sharp and pointed, like knives. It could almost be missed, but there is something profoundly terrifying in this adjustment that I’m not quite able to explain.
What activates the work, apart from our own troubling image in the mirrors, is that the viewer also has to make a decision. Do they stand on the outside and look in, or do they take the uncomfortable step and walk on the bodies of the dead? And if they choose to enter, are they now implicated somehow in the depicted atrocity? It feels like hallowed ground and the temptation is to both resist and take a first step. It’s a stage that invites you to take part in its theatre. The surface is rough underfoot. It’s a chilling experience. I’m also aware of my muddy boots adding to or even disrespecting the surface. Another detail is that some of the figures have their feet and wrists chained. They are trapped. They can’t escape and fly away like the figures on the doors. Hedging speaks of an enclosure, but it’s also about moving around something, direct avoidance. And within our unspeakable heritage, built up of the traumas of the past, we are invited into Williams’ work, to not hedge around but confront.
It can be difficult at times to separate the artist from the artwork they make. The biography and knowledge of an individual can be so important to what and how something is viewed. This is a popular commentary at the moment in the creative industries - should, or can we, enjoy something good produced by someone considered a bad person. How implicated are we for watching, partaking, listening, and getting pleasure from an art form produced by someone whose morals don’t reflect the consensus. Equally, should certain features of a personality or life be romanticised as an important aspect of our interpretation of their output. Is the myth of (creative) suffering integral to great or even good art?
When the playwright Sarah Kane wrote 4:48 Psychosis, it was considered by some as her suicide note because of its prophetic nature. As she has said, it is about “a psychotic breakdown, and what happens to a person’s mind when the barriers which distinguish between reality and the different forms of the imagination completely disappear”. When I think of Sarah Kane I want to find some aesthetic in her personal pain. Maybe this is wrong of me, I don’t wish to glorify it or trespass, and maybe it’s something she has already done for her audience anyway. Reading a line of her work - “At 4:48 when depression visits I shall hang myself to the sound of my lovers breathing” - however brutal, it feels that she has already turned horror into beauty, and depression becomes poetry. To quote Susan Sontag “depression is melancholy minus its charms”. For a sufferer of depression, possibly melancholy is the ultimate aim; to distract, convert, avoid, channel or even delay the troubled mind from something less charming.
I talk with William on the phone maybe once a week. We have spoken about suicide among other things. Most of all we laugh and complain. I recall William saying that “he wouldn’t talk someone down off the ledge, but he’d join them to see what the view is like from the ledge”. This speaks of some kind of empathy, of the idea that to know what someone is going through you need to see it from their perspective. This brings to mind R.D. Laing’s notorious and often referenced approach to a schizophrenic patient where Laing took his own clothes off and slowly rocked back and forth with the already naked patient, echoing the situation rather than trying to normalise it.
If Sarah Kane wrote 4:48 Psychosis, she also lived it, she became it, that is evident. William Wallace is also his art. We artists often want to claim this in order to prove our devotion, but William crafts his art around himself, it literally covers his body and shelters him. His shoes, jeans, shirts and jackets are all handmade by him. His home in Suffolk is built by him. In the field surrounded by trees are a series of cabins joined to form a structure that caters to his living and work needs. A wagon also built by him, painted in blue and gold sits ready for the winter months, the large wheels raising the base off the cold ground. He’s the outsider we all fantasise about being, but are too timid to take up the perceived limitations of comfort and modern living desires. An outsider is exactly where he’d want to be positioned. And it is where he’s positioned himself, psychologically if not completely geographically on the outskirts of a society. Living outside of community, outside in the open. A freedom that enables escape at any moment. A chance to move on and leave no trace.
William shows me an old black and white photograph from 1978. It has been taken in some misty woods. From left to right can be seen some horse harnesses hanging up, this is followed by a dappled grey horse with its head to the ground, then someone - William - seated with a black dog. To the right are two women sat in between the shafts of a bow-top wagon. One, head turned, appears to be in conversation with William, while the other looks off to her left and out of the photo - already moving on, out of the frame. It is perfectly composed, like a set. A simple way of life and one William is still embracing.
If labels are to be used then William is first and foremost a craftsman. At the age of three, he taught himself to sew buttons by watching and copying his mother. This was done on a small piece of cloth. Later aged twelve, with an increasing love of horses and attracted to a horse brass in the window, he walked into a harness makers shop belonging to a Mr Jimpson. It was he who encouraged William in the craft of horse harness-making. William began to find and drag old harnesses out of derelict barns. He’d take them apart, see how they’d been constructed, then he’d reassemble and restitch them. His approach then, is the same as now; to understanding how something is made involves taking it apart and putting it back together again. The young William started writing to Mr. Jimpson to tell him what he was doing. Years later, after Mr Jimpson died, William solved his work dilemmas and problems with an inner dialogue - “Mr Jimpson, what do I do now?”
I feel all of this personal information is important to William’s work Hedging Around Our Heritage. I think it matters that he measures, cuts and hand stitches his own clothes and has built structures to inhabit. His work and the life he has made - his home - comes from and incorporates a craft he has developed and perfected over the years. Skills that have been passed on to him from watching others and from taking their craft apart. Hedging Around Our Heritage is a result of this lineage and so this seems vital to our understanding of it. It crosses the boundaries between art and craft.
Its completion has taken over five years but that time was not about uncertainty or indecision. In a way, the work has had to live a life. Being made out in the open, it’s had to be protected from the elements. From the cold frosts and the baking sun. From wind and rain. It’s had to experience nature in the way William has had to experience it. It’s had to be made in daylight and stopped as the nights draw in. It’s had to allow the seasons to dictate its existence, unintentionally given time to age, to look like it was created centuries ago. But it’s also been witness to our time, of many lives lost in the pandemic. To the rapid conflicts that have increased and changed since the first draft of this writing. To personal and private losses. These things haunt the work and are imbued in its surface and the time spent creating it.
As myself and William are talking, two massive Chinooks fly overhead and interrupt our conversation. We hear them before we see them, their composite rotor blades cutting through the air. According to William, this happens often. He mentions other, more sinister-looking craft that also pass over. I think of them looking down on the view in the field, curious at what it is. Maybe it’s something all too familiar. The military history of Suffolk is well documented and even now, on occasions, one can witness the US Special Tactics Squadron’s carrying out exercises along the coast.
Let’s return to Sarah Kane and her staged work Blasted, first performed at the Royal Court Theatre, London in 1995. The play, shocking in its horrific dialogue and uncomfortable scenes was in part a response to the Bosnian genocide. Lines between two characters read like the worst kind of imaginings :
Soldier Went to a house just outside town. All gone. Apart from a small boy hiding in the corner. One of the others took him outside. Lay him on the ground and shot him through the legs. Heard crying in the basement. Went down. Three men and four women. Called the others. They held the men while I fucked the women. Youngest was twelve. Didn't cry, just lay there. Turned her over and - Then she cried. Made her lick me clean. Closed my eyes and thought of -
Shot her father in the mouth. Brothers shouted.
Hung them from the ceiling by their testicles.
Ian charming
Soldier never done that?
Ian no
Seen by many as grotesquely violent she hit back at “the failure of critical establishment in this country to develop a satisfactory critical language. Any play which contains scenes of violence will be seen as a violent play, rather than a play about violence, because they don’t know how to talk about it”. Kane’s statement is vital to William’s Hedging Around Our Heritage. It is not a violent work - it is a work about violence. It comes from a place of horror, anger and sadness. It’s not one political stance, it has no agenda in that way - that would be propaganda. It depicts all humanity and all human suffering. It is all of our heritages.
Sadly, it feels so important and reflective of today’s world. It looks back at what’s gone, it sits in our complex and fractious present and will stretch into the future and foreboding conflicts when we are gone. The choice the work sets up for the viewer to experience is to walk in and see what William has described as being like a clearing in the woods or be protected by the barrier or hedge that encloses and conceals what’s within.
The cultural theorist Slavoj Žižek in his book Violence - Six Sideways Reflections argues that violence should be looked at awry; that neither “direct confrontation” with violence nor “cold analysis” serves our understanding. The first acting as a kind of lure, the second merely adding to the trauma. Instead, he suggests that the only approach to his subject is one which "permits variations of violence kept at a distance out of respect towards the victims". William's Hedging Around Our Heritage appeals to this way of looking - this sideways glance Žižek speaks of. The figures, obviously images of skeletons are stylised and uniform in their anatomy. There are no shifts in scale suggesting children, no clothes suggesting identity. This makes them a motif for all victims - not confrontational, non-hierarchical and not cold dispassion. There is also the reflective function of the stainless steel. Although they multiply what is seen, it is also another way to divert the gaze and to look via a mediator.
The moral choices of William’s work bring to mind Mike Kelley’s installation Pay For Your Pleasure, 1988. It’s a work that adapts to its given location, changing from place to place. Consisting of forty-two painted Tyvek banners in different colours, it is designed to usually line a corridor. Each banner depicts a portrait of a known artist, poet, philosopher or writer with a quote beneath them about morality. A few read -
A PAINTING IS A THING WHICH REQUIRES AS MUCH CUNNING, RASCALITY AND VISCIOUSNESS AS THE PERPETRATION OF A CRIME. 'DEGAS’
I HAVE A MAD IMPULSE TO SMASH SOMETHING, TO COMMIT OUTRAGES.
'HERMANN HESSE'
THE SIMPLEST SURREALIST ACT CONSISTS OF DASHING DOWN INTO THE STREET, PISTOL IN HAND, AND FIRING BLINDLY, INTO THE CROWD. 'ANDRE BRETON'
At the end of the corridor is an artwork by a serial killer who is connected to the location where the work is being installed. For Chicago, where it was first shown at the Renaissance Society, it was a painting by the mass murderer John Wayne Gacy. Our grizzly pleasure at seeing an artwork made by the same hand that’s killed isn’t free. Pleasure comes at a cost; moral or financial. Our enjoyment and access to guilt-free exploitation and voyeurism is part of the work in the form of a money box. We can pay our way out. The money, if the visitor chooses to participate, goes towards local victims’ rights organisations. As Kelley has said in an interview - “My initial reason to do the work was based on people's attraction to evil and the ways they sublimate that. If you look at something terrible, as long as there's a message you can label it with it's OK. Like if you watch somebody being murdered and you say "this is an example of what you shouldn't do." "Oh, yes, that's a good thing to see."
Williams's work Hedging Around Our Heritage doesn’t accuse, but it also doesn’t allow remorse or guilt-free access in the way Kelley is bringing to our attention. If there is any hope in it, it can be found in the passing down through history of the ability, knowledge and reason to make. It is the craft and the human hand sensitively used to create rather than destroy that stops the work from being overbearing. It’s time. It’s the survival and example of something; the creative heritage running through generations that gives hope. Surviving, as a friend of Sarah Kane expressed, is also an “act of defiance”.
Although William taught himself his craft, he would be keen to teach and show his skills to others before they become completely abandoned and lost. Not all things handed down have to be trauma. The light is starting to fade. I say goodbye to William and make my way back to the station. Walking through the tree lined paths in the darkness, the mud and earth and history carried beneath my feet.