Encountering Screen Art on the London Underground

About 60 miles of beautiful views Anna Barriball
For the past forty years, the material form of public art works has included media of various kinds. The use of film and video in public art practice breaks with a tradition of fixed, monumental public art, the memorial culture that writer W.G Sebald describes as the official sanctioning of forgetting (1). In a culture of moving image public installations, by contrast, the architectural fabric of the city becomes dynamic, uncertain, a fluid surface suggestive of the contingency of urban life. Each time we encounter a video screen the images may vary, depending, for example, on the particular intersection of a looped programme and a finely timed daily commute. As time-based media, the presence of moving image screens in the city mixes with the various temporal flows of urban space. Each art-work is of course functioning in relation to a given environment, drawing on a tradition of site-specific art practice that became prominent in the 1970s (2). The majority of what might be called intermedial public art works has been commissioned for a particular location, negotiating with factors of history and neighborhood, material properties and environmental atmosphere, and the habitual and exceptional uses of a space by various communities, commuters, tourists and individuals. Site-specific art as it was conceived over forty years ago challenges a heritage of timeless and universal public art, inserting into urban contexts artworks that surprise and engage; perhaps most significantly, many of these art-works can only be understood within the dynamic situation of their context (3).

The spectacle of moving images on the surface of walls in a public site remains an urban curiosity. As Alan Kaprow has argued of video more generally, it retains a novelty in the shift of a domestic medium into a public space (4). Public screen works potentially create a slippage in our sense of private and public technologies and worlds. In addition to this schism, these moving images ‘dislocate’ in another way (5). In public space they move alongside us as our uncanny doubles; images (and words) travel with the rhythmic movement of bodies, cars, trains and goods circulating through the vectors of a city. Such artworks may or may not, of course, impinge on our consciousness, and if they should do so, they may or may not register as art. In Pixels and Places: Video Art in Public Space, Catrien Schreuder argues that it is possible to distinguish two types of practice defining screen art in urban space, one concerned with the work and its street location, and the other, a modern form of ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’, a work of overlapping interests of artists, architects and urban planners (6). This latter form of public art is found on London’s underground system, where art works are conceived at the intersection between the values and public commitments of a transport system, and the reflexive practice of artists from an international context. Screen art on the underground exists within a culture of eclectic display, alongside information screens, ambient time-filler loops and advertising, sometimes discreetly, at other times prominently and spectacularly. Here, Tamsin Dillon, Head of Art on the Underground, talks about the programme.

JH: Why is art commissioned for the underground system? What’s the broadest remit for what art might be doing in these spaces of transport and transition?

TD: Art on the Underground commissions art to enhance the Tube’s customer journey experience. The programme is funded by London Underground as part of its customer service programme. On that level it’s a very small budget. With that as a starting point and within those limitations, I think it’s important to say that we create a credible world-class art programme. Over the years we’ve established a set of criteria, aims and objectives around which the programme is based. So it’s about enhancing journey experience in the first instance, but presenting art to a very diverse audience, most of whom are not necessarily familiar with visiting art galleries or encountering art in their everyday lives. Presenting the most stimulating art that we can in that context reflects London as a cultural city. We produce and present work by artists whose work you might easily encounter in galleries in the city as well.

JH: When you’re talking about enhancing the journey experience by exposing people to art, particularly people who may not necessarily go to galleries, does the principle of presenting art on the underground belong to some kind of socialist tradition, or is that too big a claim?

TD I don’t think its been explicitly a socialist tradition but it builds on the London Underground legacy of commissioning art and design of the highest quality as part of its brand. That was developed in the early part of the twentieth century. A man called Frank Pick, famous for being one of its pioneering managing directors, commissioned people like Charles Holden to design modern new stations for the Piccadilly line. He commissioned Harry Beck to design the Tube map. He also commissioned artists like Man Ray, Edward Mcknight Kauffer, Laslo Moholy Nagy, some of the best artists in the world, to design posters that went into the underground to promote the journey itself. He’s also responsible for some of the technical innovations that were happening, like the new pneumatic doors or escalators. His vision was embedded in the unifying principle of Total Design, bringing together all these different elements.

JH: When does that date from?

TD: Arguably it dates from right at the beginning of the twentieth century, but Frank Pick was bringing that work together in the 1920s and 1930s. It’s a very long and rich heritage that we’re building on.

JH: It’s interesting to think about the modernist dimension of this legacy, of architecture and transport, and art and design, being part of a shared concept of how people should live in urban contexts. Were there models for art on the underground in other countries that may have influenced the UK, or was the UK an influential force in this respect?

TD: That’s an interesting question. The combination of art and underground travel is certainly something that you will find in other metro systems globally. London Underground is the first underground railway system in the world, in fact it’s about to celebrate its 150th anniversary in 2013, so its obviously a pioneer and innovator in all sorts of ways of how an underground railway system could work. So bringing art and good design into that environment was part of its ambition, and art is a connecting factor between national and international colleagues. I think London Underground has prided itself on being pioneering and influential rather than imitating other models.

However you’ve talked about how it comes out of a modernist tradition bringing together all sorts of disciplines and certainly the way London Underground developed in the mid 20th century was very influenced by European modernism. Frank Pick and Charles Holden in particular were influenced by journeys that they took together in Europe, and they came back thinking about how to bring a modern European design ethic into the way that they designed buildings and systems for London Underground.

Now it seems to be globally an activity placing art within travel systems. It’s something that many travel authorities think about, the question of how to incorporate good design and art into their systems. It depends on the funding model I suppose. Most travel authorities commission permanent works as part of capital projects because that’s the most cost efficient way to do it. Art on the Underground is delivering some projects as part of certain capital projects that are happening on the Underground, and they’re funded by part of the budget for those capital projects. A programme that presents largely temporary projects in such an environment is relatively rare; I think one reason for that is that it’s more of a challenge to defend funding for temporary projects, particularly in the current economic climate.

JH: Are you saying that funding for permanent artworks is seen to be a better investment than temporary exhibits that form part of an experience but one that’s only offered for a limited amount of time?

TD: I suppose it could be seen like that. Having something more permanent, that seems to be a longer term investment, is perhaps always going to be looked upon as a safer bet, as long as it’s maintenance-free of course.

JH: Does that frustrate you, that funders (internally or externally) are happier to support something that is permanent, a monument if you like to art, rather than something that is less enduring but more experimental?

TD: Yes, the cost benefit scenario tends to have greater resonance when projected over the long term. I’ve spent a lot of time making the benefits clear for a programme of temporary projects. It helps that London Underground has a robust customer service strategy, which the objectives for the Art on the Underground programme can link to.

JH: Because the customer service strategy is about addressing people’s experience, if you like the more human aspects of travel, rather than the pragmatic ones?

TD: Exactly, but that has to be carefully realized in terms of cost benefits as well. At London Underground, this is done by measuring customer experience, how people felt about their last journey, and how they feel about London Underground in general. These measures are taken through surveys to give an annual score for London Underground’s reputation. Art on the Underground can contribute to that scoring process.

JH: Listening to you talk about it in those terms it seems really quite endearing, a part of a public service culture that’s disappearing, ‘taking care’ of people as they go to work. The Underground system moves people round the city fairly efficiently, but often in very crowded, oppressive situations, so the project of art in this context might be thought of as taking care of people’s psyches. I wonder if this is also a legacy of modernism, the sense that urban life brought anxiety and neurosis, and to which Anthony Vidler has more recently added agoraphobia and claustrophobia as psychopathologies of urban space (7)?

TD: Yes definitely, and it’s seen as compatible with good business because London Underground wants to improve its reputation, or be seen to have a good reputation for that.

JH: Thinking comparatively, can you name a few cities that have art on the underground programmes and the sorts of work that they commission?

TD: There’s quite a strong programme in New York, the Arts for Transit, and they certainly focus on permanent artworks as part of their capital projects, although they also have a small temporary programme, which goes on some of their trains as well. Then there’s Stockholm, Munich, Lisbon and further afield, Taipei, where I visited quite recently. I’d say most metro systems globally have in some way considered how to bring an art aspect into the way that they work. Art on the Underground differs mainly in its focus on bringing a contemporary art programme, something that you might encounter in a gallery or in another cultural organization, into a transport environment. In terms of the artists and the artworks we produce, the standard and quality is the same as galleries.

JH: So it’s an ambitious experiment with contemporary artworks and their relationship to environments, rather than reinforcing conventional ideas about art?

TD: Yes, rather than presenting something decorative, we offer artists an opportunity to make a new work and customers an opportunity for a new encounter with art. This has been acknowledged as a challenging approach but I think its important not to compromise on what we can deliver. The starting point is the artists that we invite and what they want to present.

JH: Can we bring screens into the discussion here in two respects? One is that earlier on when you were talking about maintenance costs, and I’m interested in the pragmatics of getting screens into these places and types of regulations and obstacles that have to be observed or overcome. Second, related to what you were just saying about challenging people’s ideas about art in public space, I imagine that screen art is something of a surprise for a lot of your customers in various ways, either because they expect screens to be advertising something, or because we still anticipate framed images in public spaces to be still images. Were you the first person to commission screen art on the underground or does it predate your time?

TD: I’ve been developing Art on the Underground for about eight years or so and the programme existed for a couple of years before that. There hadn’t been any work on film or screens with the exception of some small projects on the website, which is perhaps the easiest presentation mode without a dedicated physical space for viewing moving image works. Many contemporary artists work with moving image in many different ways, so we had to consider how to incorporate that area into the programme. At the same time as we began to think about it, CBSO, the company responsible for selling the advertising space, started to bring moving image screens into the Tube. However, those screens weren’t the first opportunities for Art on the Underground to present film within the Underground; instead we built bespoke screen based spaces, working opportunistically in the way that we’ve worked with many of our projects.

For example, at Gloucester Road station, we have commissioned many large-scale artworks on the redundant platform simply because it is available and no advertising, information or signage is in the way. We took a similar approach when we started presenting moving image works as part of the programme. One of the first artists we worked with to present moving images was Stephen Willats, for a commission as part of a series for the Piccadilly line. The film was made between and presented at two stations at one end of the line. The film reflects on the different ways that people communicate with each other. We found sites within the two stations to situate the three-screen works that Willats produced. One was installed in an old shop unit with the screens facing out into the ticket hall, and the other was installed in an old information unit within the station itself.
Assumptions and Presumptions Stephen Willats
JH: These were situated at Rayners Lane and Sudbury Town stations?

TD: Yes, where we commissioned the works especially.

JH: And what was your sense of what the public thought of the screens, and how do you solicit feedback?

TD: Getting feedback to know how people are responding is one of our biggest challenges. We use various methods to get feedback; the simplest one is to invite people to leave comments on our website. We have a line on all our promotional materials asking for feedback via our website. Spending a day on the network interviewing customers to get feedback sounds simple and straightforward but it requires further resources, so we only do it infrequently.

In terms of the Willats commission in particular, I’d need to look at our research material to know what the response was. Tube users would have seen something unusual; not what they might expect to see in a ticket hall. They would either have engaged with it and looked a bit closer, or not. There would have been information near the work, leaflets and a notice suggesting more information can be found on our website. We need to make it easy for people to get more information if they want it. I assume the audience would either watch the film, understand it, enjoy it and move on, or possibly look for more information and engage with it further. The opportunity to see the work is there, the presentation is very high quality, and it looks like something unusual, out of place even, so it attracts attention that way. I think the people that use the Tube are frequently underestimated. They’re constantly interpreting complex messages through advertising and signage, and they’re negotiating their way through quite a complicated environment all the time. So, even if we present a work that’s quite subtle or conceptual, we always get some kind of feedback. People either understand it and respond to it very positively or we get less positive feedback but any response is important – it shows that the work has engaged people.

JH: is there anything that particularly characterizes the feedback you get from screen-art works?

TD: I have learnt that, particularly in the Tube environment, people really respond if they see something more than once and more than one place. Certainly companies that advertise on the Tube have understood that. What they’ll do is place an advert for something on an escalator, say a film or some new technological device, then another advert for the same thing with the same message in a different place in the station. So people follow a trail of adverts that reinforce the message. I think if you don’t do that, people are less likely to pick up on what you’re trying to do. We use that opportunity by promoting our projects with posters across the Tube network, and using the idea of the network as routes. We can do this in two ways, by using one poster in each station, and also by using unsold advertising space. The feedback that we get is always more dense, there’s more of it and its more engaged, when we’ve had an opportunity to put more information out there. It’s as simple as that.

JH: So you might have one work in one location but you have lots of trailers for it in other sites?
Linear Dryden Goodwin
TD: Yes, in terms of a screen-work the one that we presented that may have had more feedback was by Dryden Goodwin. It was part of the Jubilee line series; the artist made drawings of over sixty members of the staff working on the Jubilee line. He represented every single station and every single level of staff by drawing portraits; he filmed the drawing as he made it and he recorded the conversation with the sitter. Each drawing took between half an hour to an hour. Dryden edited all of the films down to two or three minutes each, including the conversations. You can see these on the Art on the Underground website and the conversations are particularly engaging because they reveal so much. We also had the opportunity to use unsold ad space on the advertising digital screens, particularly on the escalator panels. Dryden edited the films down to five seconds, so that you see the drawings appear very quickly. That had a really powerful impact on promoting the work and encouraging people to visit the website, which is another way that we monitor impact and engagement (the hits to our website always go up when we first launch a project or campaign). Using advertising screens in a creative and meaningful way, is something that we would always want to try to do. But for many reasons we don’t get the opportunity on a regular basis – the spaces are sold for advertising and otherwise many other messages have to take priority.

JH: With Dryden Goodwin’s project, a screen on the Underground would lead you to another screen after your journey, extending the narrative of your travel?

TD: Yes, we’ve learnt that it works well if we can use the network in this way. By ‘network’ I mean literally the Tube network and also the accompanying information network. We create layers of programming, involving different ways that people can encounter art works. They can see them as site-specific works in a particular station, and also in the system of posters they encounter. There are also interventions via other information. For example, our Tube map cover series, which inserts an artwork onto the front cover of a piece of travel information is another way we’ve engineered an encounter with art. The artists we work with are also keen to exploit these different ways of working. In 2008 we commissioned 100 artists to make a new artwork using the London Underground logo. With those images we could make 100 new posters that we could use all over the network. We also presented the original images in an exhibition off-site, which raised our profile and allowed us to connect with people in another way. We also had an auction of the first prints of the artworks. I think that, like a lot of organizations with different methods of working, we’ve recognized that the way that you can communicate with a huge diversity of people is to operate in lots of different spaces.

JH: Do you think people might ever mistake artworks for adverts? I’m thinking about those screens on the escalators where my perception of them is that they are adverts. Do you think that there’s a blurring of genre because the device of screens could be for either?

TD: I think that undoubtedly happens. It is another thing that the artists we work with are interested in exploiting. They’re highly aware of the context and that it’s a space that is conventionally used for advertising, for getting some kind of message out to encourage people to spend money, to buy something. I think what artists like about that is that they can play with that space and that it’s a way of punctuating, or literally puncturing, that space with something unexpected, a different kind of encounter. I think that’s why we get a lot of positive feedback; because it gives people something else to see. So I think that blurring you mention happens but that people do see that there’s something different there. The punch-line isn’t and ‘this is where you can buy these things’, it’s offering a different kind of engagement.

JH: Yes, and I can see how both advertising and conceptual artwork are operating with the idea of enigma to a certain extent. But with those particular screens where you’re moving on the escalator and the screens are moving too, is there anything about the dynamism of the situation that has appealed to artists? I’m thinking of the doubling of mobility.

TD: I’d certainly think that it gets used that way all the time by the advertisers. The problem for Art on the Underground is the cost of commissioning work that could use that space in that way. I think it would be a fantastic thing to do. I suppose, going back to Dryden’s work and the way his five second drawings films were presented; they were set up so that as you moved up the escalator you were seeing a different portrait as you went past each screen. So there’s definitely a way of playing with that and I do think that multiple screens offer endless possibilities. It’s time and money that’s required to exploit this of course.

JH: Thinking about the way that transport systems are about the efficiency of movement, what does it mean to have moving images within that environment? When you stand on the Tube platform or you‘re walking along and you catch sight of something moving on the wall opposite, and a train comes in that is moving as well, the screens seem to be mimicking the process that you’re involved with. With travel you’re rarely static unless something’s gone wrong! It seems to me that part of the appeal of having screens in that context is that they’re reproducing the dynamism of flow.

TD: We seem to be heading for a world like Blade Runner where you can’t escape the moving image. Perhaps that sounds a bit pessimistic or Luddite of me but more often than not, I’m disappointed by the quality of the advertising that I see, that the space has not been understood very well. I think the site where a moving image is projected across the track is a place that calls for a very site-specific intervention and that artists are very well placed to be able to engage with that. There’s an organization that has been bringing together existing art works to present on these cross-track projectors, but its been done in a rather unsophisticated fashion. They’ve brought together a random range of cultural work representing myriad cultural organizations but I’m not sure it worked together so well in that context.

JH: Do you think that this organisation is using very conventional forms in this very dynamic situation?

TD: Yes, the opportunity to reflect that dynamism has been missed. I think the situation demands something quite specific to work in that space.

JH: I want to talk about a work that you commissioned, the piece Oil Stick Work installed at Canary Wharf (May 2010-2011), which operates in different ways to what we’ve just been describing. It’s much more about spectacle, with a huge screen — quite cinematic in scale — being given prominence within the station. Can you talk about how you came to exhibit this work, and whether you chose the work for that site, or whether the idea of the site inspired a work of this scale?

TD: We’re talking about a work by John Gerrard. It wasn’t commissioned specifically for that particular site, John was invited to present it there as part of the Jubilee line series. The theme for that series was the value of time, so many of the works we presented were time-based works. Oil Stick Work is a digital piece that unfolds over a period of thirty years. It’s a very slow piece of work featuring a grain silo on a mid-West prairie and a man who comes to work and, each day, paints a one-meter black square on the silo with an oil stick crayon.

JH: And this character is going to do this for thirty years, until 2038, is that correct?

TD: Yes, it operates in real time so what you see is a virtual world that’s moving along at the same speed as our world. As it’s set in America, when you see the work at nine in the morning London time, it’s still dark. When the character, Angelo, arrives at work in the morning, it’s round about 1pm in London. He literally paints a square meter of the building in a black oil stick and the point is that it’s going to take him thirty years to paint the entire building, which is estimated as the time when the oil supplies in the country are predicted to run out.

JH: Can I just ask, is there really someone called Angelo Martinez in a building in Kansas that this is modeled on or is this a creation?

TD: I think so yes! John Gerrard makes these works using gaming technology. As I understand it he’s been to this place and taken thousands of photographs, which are used to model the artwork; this includes photographs of a person. In this way it’s possible to put together a whole menu of different actions that this person can take, thousands of them. The artwork is set up to make him randomly do a range of things, such as stopping to look at his work, over a day.

JH: Is there a connection between the work and Canary Wharf station?

TD: The work was presented at the Venice Biennale 2009 and we thought that it would be interesting to present it at Canary Wharf station because of its political references; its reference to time, to the huge financial sector and that connection to oil reserves and Canary Wharf being at the centre, or one of the centres, of that in London. So that’s the conceptual connection. But on a physical level, we had to think about how people would encounter the work. The space at Canary Wharf station in the ticket hall seemed ideal. It’s a huge building in scale and size not unlike the Turbine hall at Tate Modern. At one end there’s an entirely redundant space, planned as an exit from the building but now just a dead end. The space is a great opportunity to present work but it requires the audience to go and look rather than walk past. People come and go from quite far away so the set-up needs to allow them a glimpse from a distance that might encourage them to take a closer look. This is why we installed such a large screen. We worked with John on the scale and dimensions of the screen. It’s built with very robust walls in order to be compliant with a working train station. We planned to present the work for one year out of its thirty-year life span – so we couldn’t use a temporary screen – we had to build something almost permanent.

JH: You couldn’t project that on a screen because the screen might get damaged, among other reasons?

TD: If we had presented something as a temporary event we probably could have just erected a temporary screen. But because this was going to be a 24/7 projection event we had to produce something very solid, and something that couldn’t be easily vandalized or tampered with. Other considerations in developing the project included the projection tower and the projectors, which needed to be powerful enough to deal with the light levels in the space. It was a significant challenge to maintain the work in those conditions but we’ve had some fantastic feedback and it did look stunning. A particular challenge was how to maintain the interest of people who regularly use the station. We wondered if the work unravels too slowly for those people. How to engage people with a work over time is something we will keep exploring.

JH: Otherwise people walk past in a habitual dream-world, ignoring the artwork much as we ignore monuments? Is narrative an important element for keeping the attention of daily commuters?

TD: Possibly, I’d always want to invite an artist to consider that rather than come up with the answer myself. The presentation of Oil Stick Work has come to an end now. The next phase for that area will be a new screen programme in that site. We’re collaborating with a whole range of arts organizations to think about and provide the content for that site, so each organization will get a season each.

JH: What kind of organizations?

TD: We’re tending to work at first with organizations that are specialists with moving image work, such as London Film and Video Umbrella (FVU) and LUX. We’re also talking to Animate and the BFI, and so on. Each organization will get a three-month period to programme for this very specific site. It’s complicated because they need to think about how to maintain interest over a period of time.

JH: Given the repetition of journeys undertaken daily. Does this mean that works for this screen will be selected from archives rather than commissioned?

TD: Yes, very few of these works are going to be commissioned specifically.

JH: So there will be a mix of experimental film and film traditionally seen in cinemas, making the identity of this screen explicitly cinematic. That seems quite different from the real-time virtual artwork of Gerrard.

TD: Yes, the idea is to create a new venue to see artists’ film, offering a different kind of encounter between artists’ film and audiences and a new opportunity for artists to think about how their work might be seen. We’re launching in 2012, and I think we’ll probably have quite a lot to learn about how this engagement might work. We’ll think about special screenings — special events — as well as having films on a looped programme running for people to go and see as they go on their journeys.

JH: So you’re anticipating that people will actually go to Canary Wharf to be an audience in that space?

TD: From time to time yes.

JH: And in those moments to transform that part of Canary Wharf station into a cinema?

TD: Yes, in a way. One challenge is how we’re going to deal with sound, particularly when you’re constantly buffeted by messages from the station speakers about the Tube service for example! It’s imperative that people can hear those announcements in case of any kind of emergency situation, but we are putting in a sound system. so we’ll see how well that works. There will be plenty of material that we would be able to present without sound, but we’re very keen to experiment with that.

JH: Cinema used to automatically assume, and produce, a collective audience or a crowd. By putting film into a transport space where there are crowds, whether people like to be in a crowd or not, it’s quite an interesting inversion of what cinema used to be. I imagine that the majority of people won’t be viewing films curated by the LUX or the FVU accidently, but will be there specifically because they know that this is happening in the station.

TD: What I’m hoping is that it will build up both of those audiences, the planned and the accidental. I think the programme in general will always draw a knowing audience and that’s quite deliberate, but if it doesn’t have an impact on the unknowing audience as well then I’m not doing my job properly as far as London Underground are concerned. That’s always been a key part of this job for me — that people will encounter something new and interesting in an unexpected context.

JH: In an interview with the artist John Gerrard, he talks about the audience on the Underground not being receptive. Audiences are crowds hurrying and blind, which reminds me of Walter Benjamin’s celebrated remarks about a work of art being ‘consummated by a collectivity in a state of distraction’(8). Is that the way that you think about a lot of the audiences for your works in different sites (in a state of distraction), or do you have more of a diverse sense of how people might come across screen works?

TD: I think there are different speeds or paces at which people are going to encounter what we put in front of them. When they are standing waiting for a train, that is the place to put something that demands a bit more contemplation and I think that a lot of artists are very keen to have that opportunity. But when people are hurrying through the stations, hurrying to get from one end of their journey to the other, that’s where I think the idea of the repeated message that we talked about before is important. Anna Barriball did a great series of works based on that concept. She produced a series of texts for posters using the New Johnson font, the font that you would expect to see on the Tube. They looked like traditional London Underground posters, but they featured little phrases that Anna had discovered on the back of a set of photographs that she found in a junk shop. The phrases referred maybe to someone’s portrait: ‘wearing a nurse’s uniform’, or to a holiday snap or a landscape: ‘looking back the way we had come’. The poster featured only the phrases – the images were absent. We produced six or seven different posters, carrying these tiny little snippets of phrases, that you might have seen on different parts of your journey. It worked as a way of getting into people’s heads from a range of places.

JH: I’m going to ask you a little bit about the dream project, but could you tell me first about the Stratford Gaffe?
Pearly Kings and Queens at The Stratford Gaff Matt Stokes
TD: Yes that’s another way that we presented as a film work by developing bespoke screen set-up. The Stratford Gaffe is a project by Matt Stokes for Stratford station. It’s a big and airy station that lends itself well to the presentation of screen-based art works. We’ve been commissioning a series of works there to reflect the way Stratford has been going through a massive transformation, particularly since the Olympic bid was won. We’ve invited artists to come in and produce projects that start with an engagement with the people who use the station and who live and work in the area. Matt Stokes predominantly works with film and video; he was invited to consider the history of the area. It’s famous for its music hall history and the fact that it’s the home of ‘cheap entertainment’. Matt discovered a key form of entertainment that development there in the Victorian era was the ‘Penny Gaffe’; where people paid a penny to be entertained by magicians, escapologists, singers and so on. He then found people in Stratford who are entertaining their audiences in similar but contemporary ways. He decided to make a film that presented the work of all these entertainers in a modern take on the Penny Gaffe. So what you encounter at Stratford station is a three-screen film showing a range of set pieces by the entertainers, one by one going through their acts. There’s an opera singer, an escapologist, a magician, dancers, a rap artist and so on. People using the station regularly will hopefully see a different entertainer each time they pass through.

JH: Is that a permanent work?

TD: No it’s a temporary work, there for one year as part of the Jubilee line series.

JH: And could you say something about the Dream…

TD: Daria Martin’s project

JH: I’m thinking about the way in which we’ve been talking about the different experiences that people have as they’re travelling on the underground and the way in which artists are trying to engage with multiple psychic states. Daria Martin’s project is a direct attempt by an artist to find out what people are thinking, not just to engage but to get inside the heads of travelers. Could you describe the contours of that project?
Poster for Jubilee line customer daydream survey by Daria Martin Daria Martin and TfL
TD: It was also one of the Jubilee line series commissions and therefore based on the concept of time. Daria’s aim was to discover what people do when they are spending time on the Underground, what’s going through their heads. She started thinking about this because at one end of the Jubilee Line is the Freud Museum, which made her think about the psychology of people as they are travelling underground. The project explores what its like to be in a dark gloomy place, not a natural situation, and what daydreams people might have to take themselves out of that situation. We worked with the Freud Museum and took photographs from inside it. Using these images, the project began with a series of posters inviting people to log on to our website and let us know what their daydreams were about. We were quite astonished by the range of response we got. We also interviewed people in stations to ask them about their daydreams. Something like six hundred face-to-face interviews took place. Some were undertaken by the artist, some by the Art on the Underground team, and some by a consultancy. We got an unusually high response rate; perhaps when people are not being sold something, they are more willing to be interviewed! I think what Daria, and what many artists we work with are interested in is how to set up a dialogue with the people that use the Tube and what you can do with it in terms of feeding that back out again and stimulating ideas about travel.

JH: From reading through a selection of the responses on the website, people are far more positive in their thoughts than I might imagine they would be. I’m thinking about the conditions of underground travel as being quite frustrating, and crowded and marked by unwanted intimacy, and yet people are quite often dreaming utopian thoughts! I also noticed that there are a number of comments that are about using a number of media to create the experience of travel, for example, one says ‘I often daydream about the trailers or adverts for films according to what music I’m listening to and I put myself in them.’ And there’s another one, ‘listening to the words of the song on the i-Pod sometimes I’m in the song which is enveloping everyone’. So there seems to be a way in which we’re using personal devices to create our own experience combined with other cues from the environment, the adverts and maybe the screen works, to make something more fictional.

TD: That seems symptomatic of the fact that this is around us all the time, it doesn’t surprise me at all.

JH: I’m thinking of the ways that screen contents play into, or encourage, a sense of a fictional world. Most screens, be it advertising or artworks, don’t have sound in these spaces, so whatever kind of dialogue you’re having in your head with someone else or listening to a song could be fitted to those images. I wonder if that is part of how screens operate on the underground, that they are a facilitator that enables these sorts of daydreams to connect up the personal and the public

TD: Yes, it must work somehow like that. I think the artists we work with are very much aware of that. They are not offering an opportunity to visit an art gallery and have an exclusive one to one experience with a painting or a sculpture, but they are aware that whoever is going to encounter the work that they are presenting is also in the middle of quite a complex situation; they’re travelling, they’re having to think about all sorts of other things. So whatever artists are presenting is going to be something that has to address that as well as helping travelers to escape from that situation or take their minds in a different direction.

JH: I’m thinking about the different types of screen works that you’ve commissioned artists to make, and the development of audio-visual technologies from cinema to television to more portable devices and music. It would seem that the televisual, that kind of domestic, bounded way of experiencing screen media and the live relay of events, isn’t represented on the Underground. Its much more cinematic, matched with personal devices. Would it be fair to say that the screens on the Underground are more cinematic than they are televisual? The question that I have here on my sheet is whether screens on the Underground attempt to make the city cinematic, by which I mean larger than life, romantic, spectacular. Reading through some of the comments from Daria Martin’s project, there seems to be a way in which screens invite people to inscribe themselves into some kind of romantic story that includes image, and sometimes image and music combinations.

TD: I just think it’s symptomatic, that that’s the way we think or the mindset that people are in when they are moving through London.

JH: Is that a feature of the encounter of screen works on the Underground, or more generally the way that people move through transport systems?

TD: Possibly transport generally, but I like to think it’s a feature of the Underground.

 

Published, 2013, in Public Space, Media Space Editors: Berry, C., Harbord, J., Moore, R. (Eds.)

1. W.G.Sebald (2005) Campo Santo, translated by Anthea Bell, London: Penguin
2. Miwon Kwon (2003) One Place After Another, MIT Press.
3. Tom Finkelpearl (ed.) (2000) Dialogues in Public Art, Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, England: MIT Press
4. Alan Kaprow (2008) ‘Video Art: Old Wine, New Bottle’ in California Video: Artists and Histories, edited Glenn Phillips: Paul J Getty Museum, p.118.
5. On the value of dislocation in urban space see Bernard Tschumi (1996) Architecture and Disjunction, Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, England: MIT Press
6. Catrien Schreuder (2009) Pixels and Places: Video Art in Public Space, Netherlands: NAi Publishers
7. Anthony Vidler (2001) Warped Space: Art, Architecture and Anxiety in Modern Culture, Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, England: MIT Press
8. Walter Benjamin (1936/1969) ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in Illuminations, translated Harry Zorn, edited by Hannah Arendt, New York: Schocken Books.