I took this photo last week and already things have changed - there is a large red crane in front of it this morning. I had wanted to contrast this with a picture of the interior of our gallery for Breaking the Rules in a sort of competition as to who is going to finish first. The new terminal was one reason we wanted to do the exhibition in the first place - and for a while there were lots of trains potentially in the exhibition - I think we are down to the Cendrars/Delaunay 'Prose of the Trans-Siberian' and a Russian photomontage book cover. We had even thought of reviving the title 'All Change'. 'A Slap in the Face' was another possibility until the Estorick Collection used it first - I quite liked the idea of getting somebody in the gallery to slap visitors in the face. We did some quick market testing on visitors to the popular 'London in Maps' exhibiition:
Breaking the Rules 9 1st choice 2 2nd choice
Tango with Cows 4 1st 2 2nd ('sounded like an academic trying to be clever')
World in Reverse 3 1st, 5 2nd
Manifesto 2 1st, 0 2nd
Speed and Noise (1 1st, 2 2nd)
So Breaking the Rules it was. It's easy to get pedantic on rules! What rules did the avant garde break? Don't you need rules so you can break them? Did the avant garde create their own rules? Is conformity the new rule-breaking? etc.
But the title also references typography - the type-high strips of metal used in printing - and after 'Blast', 'Dada', El Lissitsky and Rodchenko graphic design certainly wasn't the same again. Type-high and rules reminds me of the book artist, Ken Campbell, who used letterpress and nearly every printmaking process to print and overprint books that broke the rules Ken Campbell's Broken Rules. The revival in interest in and production of the artist's book in the last twenty years may have something to do with the book being liberated from being the sole carrier of information. (But how does that relate to the Russian Futurists in the 1910s challenging traditional notions of what a book should be, but at the highpoint of print culture ??)
I have drifted off the Eurostar subject. I would still like to get twenty or so people together for one of the first arrivals with those signs you see in the arrivals halls of airports etc. held by car drivers and greeters, but this time with the names of the avant garde on the card: 'Apollinaire', 'Ball', 'Breton', 'Tzara', 'Schwitters' etc.
