“Welcome to Warkworth Farm: This Side Paradise” (2020-21) is a free-standing, three-panel screen marking the occasion of the artist’s visit to the studio of Art & Language (Michael Baldwin and Mel Ramsden). The work consists of three hinged panels of white painted birch plywood, on which is mounted three LED light fixtures. The LED light fixtures show a configuration of letters. The first group on the left spells out the phrase “W H AUDEN WROTE THIS FOR YEATS X”; the third group on the extreme right displays the same message encoded using a transposition cipher invented during the early-19th century. The second, middle group of letters displays a new message, which is also encoded using the same cipher. Since a text and its encoding is presented on the first and third panels, a diligent viewer should be able to decode the text on the second, middle panel of the screen.
“Welcome to Warkworth Farm: This Side Paradise” references the poet W. H. Auden, whose sense of the nature and role of art has had particular resonance for Art & Language. The form of a free-standing screen was chosen because of its significance as a furnishing that serves several functions: as the ground for illustrated poetry, as demarcating the scene of official social encounters involving the performance of authority, and as an architectural feature enclosing an area of private domestic space. The screen functions symbolically, announcing to all who encounter it that the space it constitutes is to be treated as separate and meaningful.
Such a pared-down structure is not without its more contemporary historical antecedents in Minimal Art which, if one recalls, demands of the viewer a particular awareness of their body in relation to various structures positioned in the exhibition space. In the setting of The Nasher Sculpture Center, the screen should be considered as a boundary demarcating another space, that of the artist’s studio. The text on the screen is intended to function like a notice posted in institutional spaces that announces the safe occupancy limit. Except in this case, the text is a moralizing discourse articulating what is at stake in conversations and work that will take place within the confines of the studio. In keeping with the gravity of the occasion of a studio visit, some exertion by the viewer—in the form of decoding the message of the central LED panel—is demanded. Without that effort, the message remains scrambled and incomprehensible, and the viewer’s experience remains that of a cultural tourist.
In truth, one’s engagement with this work needn’t be so po-faced. Considered ironically, “Welcome to Warkworth Farm: This Side Paradise” may also be viewed as a light-hearted, if bittersweet, commentary on what was once a fraught relationship among erstwhile colleagues, but now exists as an indelible bond of friendship, intellectual exchange, and a reminder of loss.
This work, a gift by the artist in honor of Jeremy Strick, the former director of The Nasher Sculpture Center, is now a part of the permanent collection.
A tour of the exhibition in which it is on view—“Generations: 150 Years of Sculpture” —may be found online at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QjbUfSG78Gc
Michael Corris 