ARTISTS TALKING

De la Warr Pavilion, Bexhill on Sea
22 July – 17 September

“Where is the war memorial where you live?” Mark Anstee asked my eleven-year-old son; he did not know, and we eventually established it was in the square behind Marks & Spencer, where his teenage sister sometimes lunches with her friends.

How we commemorate individuals involved in mass conflict is an ongoing, and of course highly topical, issue. Those who have lost loved-ones want to feel they did not die in vain; politicians find this expedient. Hence the dead are often subsumed in a ‘bigger picture’; euphemisms and hallowed words disguising sacrifice and pain.

Mark Anstee’s recent installations have dealt with death and commemoration. One by one, using a cheap biro, he draws individuals on a huge surface. All face away, but each one is different. And at the end of the effort, each one gets a final swift glance from its creator, and then a crude deletion line.

His most recent installation, Occupation in the De la Warr Pavilion, occupied the whole of gallery two. A giant cheese-shaped wedge was covered with individual crusaders; moving up a continuous surface, like a vast travellator, which is imagined to extend outside the confines of the room. This building is flooded with light (one of the first to be built with a steel structure which meant whole walls could be glass) and in the brightness, the spidery drawings look innocuous and inconsequential from a distance; like faded wallpaper in a sun-drenched room. Only when spectators move forward can the individual figures be seen.

And there they remained peacefully until day fifty-eight, when using a thick red marker, Anstee drew a line through each one, leaving the surface covered with rectangles. The tiny drawings that had meandered over the surface become a formation of strong and sinister lines; the spaces in-between figures suddenly significant. Nor is the red contained within the figures; it drips downwards. Death in a war zone is seldom neat; blood and consequences flow wider.

On top of the whole creation, hovers the athletic artist, part cat-burglar – his pockets are stuffed with tools of his trade; part Gulliver, out of proportion with the tiny world he has created. He is absorbed, head-phoned, aching. The individuals that have taken fifty-seven days to create are drawn over in two. And after the second working, the piece will be destroyed.

Reactions have been mixed. Some who came to see the building (a 1930s masterpiece) arrived convinced that art is for hanging, but became fascinated, returning so often that the gallery attendants knew their names. An articulate correspondent to the local paper saw it as an undermining symbol of our involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq. Children (my own son included) who were initially baffled by an artist destroying what he had spent weeks creating, ended up with a much stronger experience than is provided by a war memorial: a meditation on what being an individual means; the wider part we play in mass organisations.

This is true public art; encouraging us all to engage, and hopefully think.

www.alisonbaverstock.com

Alison Baverstock

Alison Baverstock is a freelance writer.